Inhalation depth varies with upcoming utterance length, suggesting utterance-level speech motor planning. Yet upcoming syntactic and prosodic structure does not influence inhalation depth when utterance length is controlled, suggesting that the effect is independent of grammatical encoding. This study investigates whether preverbal message planning, via domain-general cognitive demands, might instead influence speech breathing in a manner consistent with the utterance length effect. Fifteen young adults narrated 4 stories each in 36-s bouts of speaking while performing either a serial recall task (cognitive load) or a control task (no load). Speech audio and breathing kinematics were recorded simultaneously. Kinematic waveform segmentation yielded over 4200 speech breathing cycles from which inhalation and exhalation depth were derived. Speech within each cycle was transcribed (= utterance); inhalations were then coded for alignment with elicitation task structure (bout onset vs. within-bout), discourse structure (episode vs. within-episode boundaries), and upcoming utterance length. Analyses validated the cognitive load manipulation before testing for effects on breathing. Linear mixed effect modeling on inhalation depth revealed that speakers took deeper breaths at narrative bout onsets than within bouts, at episode boundaries than within-episode boundaries, and before longer utterances than shorter ones. Critically, cognitive load selectively modulated these effects, amplifying the task structure effect and attenuating the utterance length effect, albeit marginally; the discourse structure effect was unmodulated by cognitive load. The findings support the hypothesis that domain-general cognitive demands influence inhalation depth; physiological arousal and learned optimization of breathing for speech are proposed as linking mechanisms.
This study examines how prosodic structure regulates coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Australian English (AusE) and how this system compares with American English (AmE). Adopting a phonetic-grammar framework in which prosody serves as a structural scaffold for phonetic implementation, we manipulate focus-driven prominence and prosodic boundary strength to investigate two interrelated dimensions of nasality: nasal consonant duration and time-varying vowel nasalization. For direct comparisons, the experimental design mirrors prior work on AmE (Cho et al., 2017) and explicitly models potential phonation (glottalization) confounds. Results show that AusE and AmE share a prosodic-structural conditioning of nasality. In both dialects, prominence enhances the nasal consonant while inducing coarticulatory resistance in the adjacent vowel; and boundary effects show an asymmetry across phrase edges, with nasal duration and vowel nasalization reduced phrase-initially and enhanced phrase-finally. Crucially, however, shared prosodic organization does not entail phonetic identity. AusE shows stronger focus-induced coarticulatory resistance than AmE. Importantly, this difference is not a uniform shift in magnitude or temporal extent, but a dynamic modulation over the vowel's time course in both carryover (NVC) and anticipatory (CVN) contexts. This difference persists after including glottalization (stronger under focus in AusE) as a covariate, implying genuine differences in velopharyngeal coordination. Moreover, such modeling reveals a stronger domain-initial boundary effect on vowel nasalization (initial reduction in NVC) in AusE than in AmE. We conclude that dialectal variation operates at the level of phonetic grammar with reference to prosodic structure: while AusE and AmE share abstract phonological categories and prosodic representations, they differ systematically in the fine-tuning of control parameters at the phonetics-prosody interface, differentially balancing system-oriented efficiency and output-oriented distinctiveness. (c) 2026 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
This study investigates how socially conditioned phonetic variation is integrated into the phonological system, focusing on the three-way place contrast among Mandarin sibilants (/s g q/). Previous research has shown that young female speakers tend to produce a more fronted /q/, a variant associated with socially desirable speech styles. In a wordlist reading task, 40 young Mandarin speakers, balanced for gender, produced sibilants followed by /a/ or /u/. The results show that, in the /a/ context, female speakers exhibit higher spectral mean frequency (M1) values for both /q/ and /s/ compared to male speakers. This pattern aligns with cross-linguistic findings linking higher-frequency fricatives to feminine speech styles, while simultaneously reinforcing a robust /s/-/q/ contrast. In the /u/ context, however, increased M1 is observed only for /q/, reducing its spectral separation from /s/. Under these conditions, the onset F2 cue becomes even more prominent, compensating for the diminished spectral contrast. Crucially, this enhancement of the F2 cue is more pronounced among female speakers, enabling the implementation of socially driven /q/-fronting under contextual constraints. Taken together, these findings show that socially meaningful variation can be actively incorporated into the phonological system, balancing social expression with structural stability. (c) 2026 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
This study examines how articulation rate is structured across a large and heterogeneous set of English varieties with respect to both speech production constraints and social factors. Through Bayesian distributional regression modelling of articulation rate mean and variance across 33 varieties of British and North American English drawn from 16 spontaneous speech corpora collected as part of the SPeech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) project, we observe that the within-speaker utterance length effect on articulation rate (whereby longer utterances are produced at a faster rate and with less between-utterance variance) is large and broadly consistent across varieties. Specifically, the effect on mean rate exhibits modest variability across varieties, and between-utterance variance shows high cross-variety consistency. Small but consistent effects of speaker gender and age on articulation rate are observed across all varieties in both size and direction, and neither effect can be attributed to differences in the length of utterances, indicating that the source of these social differences lies outside of any systematic variability in utterance length. These findings across 33 hetereogeneous varieties show that the constraints imposed by utterance length on articulation rate are largely invariant across the regional and stylistic diversity of naturallyoccurring English speech, while social factors exert consistent, independent influences. (c) 2026 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
The aspiration of syllable-onset voiceless stops in English, indexed as positive Voice Onset Time (VOT), is shorter before a voiceless consonant in the syllable coda than before a voiced one. Vowel duration is also known to be shorter before voiceless codas. We propose a unitary framework in which both patterns emerge from a cohesive change in onset and vowel articulatory stiffness modulated by coda constriction. In Experiment 1, onset VOT was measured from acoustic signals in American English monosyllabic words with a mildly constricted coda (/(sic)/) vs. a highly constricted coda (voiceless stop), as in par vs. pat. In Experiment 2, the effect was investigated for the first time in French mono-and disyllables containing the rhotic /(sic)/ vs. a voiceless stop, as in part /pa(sic)/ vs. patte /pat/ and patrie /patysi/ vs. pate /pate/. VOT in English was significantly longer before coda /(sic)/ than coda voiceless stop. In contrast, no significant effect was observed in French, the French rhotic patterning as a voiceless obstruent. Our English results suggest that voiceless obstruents, which have higher stiffness than voiced ones, are anticipated with a stiffness increase beginning in the onset, making stiffness an important aspect of the syllable's role in motor control. We propose the Syllable-Body Stiffness Hypothesis to account for both the VOT and vowel duration differences: Stiffness increases in the syllable body (onset and vowel together) to anticipate the intraoral pressure buildup and articulatory force of voiceless codas, producing faster articulations and shorter acoustic durations, including shorter onset aspiration. (c) 2026 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
