Susanne Fuchs

• Dr.
• Senior scientist at Leibniz Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft

Introduction: While breathing is essential for infant speech development, it has neither been extensively studied empirically nor been included in theories of speech acquisition. In this brief report we aim to explore the co-development of respiratory and vocal control longitudinally in an infant from 7;15 to 9;15 months of age. We focused on this...

Typological research shows that across languages, trilled [r] sounds are more common in adjectives describing rough as opposed to smooth surfaces. In this study, this lexical research is built on with an experiment with speakers of 28 different languages from 12 different families. Participants were presented with images of a jagged and a straight...

Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words and other constituents from each other with astonishing precision. The acoustic properties that support this process are not well understood and remain understudied for the vast majority of the world’s languages, in particular regarding their potential variatio...

In this work we discuss the complexity surrounding the origins of human language. We focus on the debate between gesture-first and vocalization-first theories. While some evidence supports the idea that gestures played a primary role in early communication , others argue that vocalizations are equally expressive. We think that methodological differ...

This study investigates f0 adaptation, skin temperature change, and the relationship between the two. While a growing number of studies have demonstrated that emotional reactions in humans lead to changes in their facial skin temperature, none of them have studied temperature change in conversational contexts. Here, we have tested whether a convers...

When humans speak or animals vocalize, they can produce sounds that are further combined into larger sequences. The flexibility of sound combinations into larger meaningful sequences is one of the hallmarks of human language. To some extent, this has also been found in other species, like chimpanzees and birds. The current study investigates the st...

Introduction. Birdsong and human speech share various neural and behavioral patterns that may provide us some hints about which capacities were requirements for language to evolve (Doupe and Kuhl 1999). Among them may be the capacity to prepare motor action for the upcoming speech, song or vocalization. For instance, it has been shown that humans r...

Purpose This study investigated whether temporal coupling was present between lower limb motion rate and different speech tempi during different exercise intensities. We hypothesized that increased physical workload would increase cycling rate and that this could account for previous findings of increased speech tempo during exercise. We also inves...

Purpose This study investigated whether speakers adapt their breathing and speech (fundamental frequency [fo]) to a prerecorded confederate who is sitting or moving under different levels of physical effort and who is either speaking or not. Following Paccalin and Jeannerod (2000), we would expect breathing rate to change in the direction of the co...

Purpose Breathing is ubiquitous in speech production, crucial for structuring speech, and a potential diagnostic indicator for respiratory diseases. However, the acoustic characteristics of speech breathing remain underresearched. This work aims to characterize the spectral properties of human inhalation noises in a large speaker sample and explore...

Gestures and speech are intimately linked, despite operating at different time scales (Grimme et al., 2011). It has been demonstrated that gesture-speech coordination tends to occur at prominent syllables (Franich, 2022; Krivokapić et al., 2017; Rochet-Capellan et al., 2008) and that gestures enhance prominence, especially in languages with flexibl...

We contribute to the growing field of phonetic studies on aging. Our data is not limited to laboratory settings, but comes from an extensive corpus of spontaneous speech data recorded over 10 years. We take the example of the frequent French discourse marker et puis 'and then'. Its occurrences are compared in 10 French female participants recorded...

The aim of the paper is to once again point out the advantages of a comparative approach between human and non-human animals as a road to a better understanding of the origin of rhythms in language evolution. To illustrate another field that would highly benefit from the comparative approach, we focus on acoustic signals of human and non-human anim...

‘Gesture-speech physics’ refers to a possible biomechanical coupling between manual gesture and speech. According to this thesis, rapid gesturing leaves a direct imprint on acoustics (intensity, F0), as gesture accelerations/decelerations increase expiratory forces and therefore subglottal pressure, leading to higher amplitude envelope peaks and hi...

Multimodal communication research focuses on how different means of signalling coordinate to communicate effectively. This line of research is traditionally influenced by fields such as cognitive and neu-roscience, human-computer interaction, and linguistics. With new technologies becoming available in fields such as natural language processing and...

Multimodal communication research focuses on how different means of signalling coordinate to communicate effectively. This line of research is traditionally influenced by fields such as cognitive and neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and linguistics. With new technologies becoming available in fields such as natural language processing and...

Gaze cues serve an important role in facilitating human conversations and are generally considered to be one of the most important non-verbal cues. Gaze cues are used to manage turn-taking, coordinate joint attention, regulate intimacy, and signal cognitive effort. In particular, it is well established that gaze aversion is used in conversations to...

Phonetic convergence-i.e., adapting one's speech towards that of an interlocutor-has been shown to occur in human-human conversations as well as human-machine interactions. Here, we investigate the hypothesis that human-to-robot convergence is influenced by the human's perception of the robot and by the conversation's topic. We conducted a within-s...

Respiratory and supralaryngeal actions differ between speech and vegetative breathing, and speech-breathing sounds convey information to listeners. To date, little work has explored how breath noise is shaped by respiratory and supralaryngeal actions. Here, we assess respiratory movement, obtained using inductive plethysmography, and lip apertures,...

We contribute to the growing field of phonetic studies on aging. Our data is not limited to laboratory settings, but comes from an extensive corpus of spontaneous speech data recorded over 10 years. We take the example of the frequent French discourse marker et puis 'and then'. Its occurrences are compared in 10 French female participants recorded...

Gesture-speech physics' refers to a possible biomechanical coupling between manual gesture and speech. According to this thesis, rapid gesturing leaves a direct imprint on acoustics (intensity, F0), as gesture accelerations/decelerations increase expiratory forces and therefore subglottal pressure, leading to higher amplitude envelope peaks and hig...

'Gesture-speech physics' refers to a possible biomechanical coupling between manual gesture and speech. According to this thesis, rapid gesturing leaves a direct imprint on acoustics (intensity, F0), as gesture accelerations/decelerations increase expiratory forces and therefore subglottal pressure, leading to higher amplitude envelope peaks and hi...

Speech inhalations, compared to vegetative breathing, are more likely to be associated with open oral postures, i.e., speakers may employ oral as well as nasal inspiration patterns. Past studies have suggested that there may be considerable individual variation for speech breathing behaviors as well. Recently, we have employed electro-optical stoma...

The present paper investigates a relationship between the acoustic signal and oro-facial expressions (gestures) when speakers (i) speak normally or whisper, (ii) do or do not see each other, and (iii) produce questions as opposed to statements. To this end, we conducted a motion capture experiment with 17 native speakers of German. The results prov...

No PDF available ABSTRACT During speech production, individuals inhale more deeply and rapidly compared to non-speaking inspiration. Such inspirations are also more frequently audible than their non-speech counterparts. To what extent do the acoustic characteristics of inhalation noise reflect respiratory contributions versus other articulatory mec...

Coordination between speech acoustics and manual gestures has been conceived as "not biologically mandated" (1). However, recent work suggests a biomechanical entanglement between the upper limbs and the respiratory-vocal system (2). Pouw and colleagues found that for movements with a high physical impulse, speech acoustics co-occur with the physic...

Lengthening of segments at the end of prosodic domains is commonly considered a universal phenomenon, but language-specific variation has also been reported, specifically in languages with a phonological vowel length contrast. This cross-linguistic study uses spontaneous speech data from the DoReCo corpus as a testbed to investigate Final Lengtheni...

Our research focuses on the acoustic characteristics of inhalation noises in speech and the underlying articulatory mechanisms. Previously, we have shown (Werner et al., 2021) two main similarities of breathing noise to selected speech sounds: a) enhanced amplitudes at frequencies corresponding to low vowel formants and b) spectral characteristics...

Gestures during speaking are typically understood in a representational framework: they represent absent or distal states of affairs by means of pointing, resemblance, or symbolic replacement. However, humans also gesture along with the rhythm of speaking, which is amenable to a non-representational perspective. Such a perspective centers on the ph...

Purpose Coarticulatory effects in speech vary across development, but the sources of this variation remain unclear. This study investigated whether developmental differences in intrasyllabic coarticulation degree could be explained by differences in children's articulatory patterns compared to adults. Method To address this question, we first comp...

Laughter is a ubiquitous vocal behavior and plays an important role in social bonding, though little is known if it can also communicate romantic attraction. The present study addresses this question by investigating spontaneous laughter produced during a 5-min conversation in a heterosexual speed-dating experiment. Building on the posits of Accomm...

Evidence for temporal coupling between spoken language and manual gestures has been found in different domains, including language acquisition (Iverson et al., 2007) and laboratory experiments examining speech during finger tapping (e.g., Parrell et al., 2014). However, it is not clear whether these findings generalize to adults engaging in real-wo...

The intent of this article is to show that speech sounds can be much more than mere meaning-distinguishing units. Through established cross-modal correspondences with other sensory dimensions, human vocalizations can bear meaning that translates to a real-world context. We argue that cross-modal correspondences and the iconic resemblance between th...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Louder speech tends to be slower than typical speech. For some vowels (viz., low and lax ones), louder speech may also be associated with higher first formant frequencies (F1s) at vowel midpoint. Possibly, increased duration allows speakers more time to reach a lower jaw position, thus a higher value of F1, in loud speech....

Aging in speech production is a multidimensional process. Biological, cognitive, social, and communicative factors can change over time, stay relatively stable, or may even compensate for each other. In this longitudinal work, we focus on stability and change at the laryngeal and supralaryngeal levels in the discourse particle euh produced by 10 ol...

Research on language use has become increasingly interested in the multimodal and interactional aspects of language-theoretical models of dialogue, such as the Communication Accommodation Theory and the Interactive Alignment Model are examples of this. In addition, researchers have started to give more consideration to the relationship between phys...

Humans move their upper limbs for communicative purposes during speaking. They gesture. Such movements interact on multiple levels with speaking. In connection to what is said, gestures meaningfully shape with varying means of representation. Yet, gestures also have non-representational aspects; they quasi-rhythmically pulse with prosodic structure...

The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of...

Link to talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIlGmnV76dA Citation: Pouw, W. & Fuchs, S. (2021). Biomechanics as the primordial basis of co-speech gesture. Presentation at the 7th International Conference “Ways to Protolanguage”, September 8th, Düsseldorf. doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/DCZAF

This paper examines the acoustic properties of breath noises in speech pauses in relation to similar speech segments and with regard to their inhalation speed. We measured intensity, center of gravity, and formants, as well as kinematic data (via Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography) for inhalations, aspirations of stops, glottal fricatives, and...

Breathing is variable but also highly individual. Since the 1980s, evidence of a ventilatory personality has been observed in different physiological studies. This original term refers to within‐speaker consistency in breathing characteristics across days or even years. Speech breathing is a specific way to control ventilation while supporting spee...

This paper examines the acoustic properties of breath noises in speech pauses in relation to similar speech segments and with regard to their inhalation speed. We measured intensity, center of gravity, and formants, as well as kinematic data (via Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography) for inhalations, aspirations of stops, glottal fricatives, and...

In daily life, articulatory movements and pointing gestures are tightly coupled. Nevertheless, the two motor systems governing the movements of the articulators and hands differ in their dynamics: the articulators are fast and much lighter than the limbs, which are slower due to their mass. We investigated the timely coordination of those motor sys...

In this study we investigate whether and how breathing patterns affect acoustically measured reaction time. Based on Sternberg's seminal experiment (Sternberg, Monsell, et al. 1978) and our pilot study (Mooshammer et al. 2019), 21 native speakers of German were recorded acoustically and by means of inductive plethysmography uttering number sequence...

In this paper we look at the temporal coordination of acoustic and respiratory events when listening and speaking. We first look at 4 German female speakers individually and then test our observations on 14 speakers. Apart from general observations on different timing between listening and speaking (fewer breath cycles and longer inhalations when l...

In his target paper entitled “General linguistics must be based on universals (or non-conventional aspects of language)”, Martin Haspelmath argues that general linguistics should be based on either cross-linguistic comparisons or on non-conventional aspects of language. What exactly is meant by“non-conventional” remains rather obscure, though. In t...

Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizat...

Although previous research has shown that there exist individual and cross-linguistic differences in planning strategies during language production, little is known about how such individual differences might vary depending on which language a speaker is planning. The present series of studies examines individual differences in planning strategies...

This study assesses (a) effects of vowel height and tense-lax status on the laryngeal closed quotient (CQ) and (b) whether respiratory volume changes vary with differences in CQ. German speakers produced words containing eight different vowels in normal and loud conditions. The only significant vowel effect was found for the /a:–a/ pair, with lower...

Some studies tested the gesture-speech link by investigating whether speech production was affected when speakers are not able to gesture with their hands. Their results are mixed. However , when hand motion is blocked or constrained, speakers may move other body parts as a compensation. Here, we investigate a potential compensation by enhancement...

Physical activity triggers physiological changes in the body that also affect systems involved in speech production. The most widely reported effect is an increase in F0, but the mechanism is not fully understood: since most studies employ vigorous exercise, it is not clear whether this is due to increased airflow or a general increase in muscle ac...

Why is breathing relevant in linguistics? In this review, we approach this question from different perspectives. The most popular view is that breathing adapts to speech because respiratory behavior has astonishing flexibility. We review research that shows that breathing pauses occur mostly at meaningful places, that breathing adapts to cognitive...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Numerous studies have assessed effects of aging on the voice, but there remains some lack of consensus on the nature and magnitude of such effects. Although discrepancies may arise from methodological factors, well-controlled studies of aging also show substantial individual differences. Documented changes in laryngeal tis...

Which position do you mean by “to the right of” an object? Starting within a few months after birth, humans use deixis like „to the right of“ in different ways in everyday situations—nonverbal deixis such as pointing gestures, and later verbal ones, too, in the form of adverbs, prepositions, and pronouns. It has been shown that deixis can be used i...

Proper speech production requires auditory speech feedback control. Models of speech production associate this function with the right cerebral hemisphere while the left hemisphere is proposed to host speech motor programs. However, previous studies have investigated only spectral perturbations of the auditory speech feedback. Since auditory percep...

Variation in speech production of older speakers can have multiple origins which are due to biological, cognitive, social and discourse factors. Studying variation synchronically or diachronically, i.e. comparing speakers across generations or, instead, by means of longitudinal data over the lifespan may also reveal different results. For example,...

Natural speech data on many languages have been collected by language documentation projects aiming to preserve linguistic and cultural traditions in audiovisual records. These data hold great potential for large-scale cross-linguistic research into phonetics and language processing. Major obstacles to utilizing such data for typological studies in...

Speech, respiration and limb movements seem interconnected in different ways. For example, speech production increases the duration of breathing cycles while physical effort shortens it. Physical activity may also improve creativity and semantic memory in relation with breathing. In this paper, we analyze changes in breath groups and breathing cycl...

In this pilot study we investigate whether and how breathing patterns affect acoustically measured reaction time. It adapted Sternberg's seminal experiment [1], varying utterance length in a simple naming experiment of ascending and descending number sequences. Nine native speakers of German were recorded acoustically and by means of inductive plet...

Please check, the book is open access and you can download all papers. https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/64900

Speakers flexibly adapt their speech production to situational demands. This study investigates the extent to which speakers adjust their articulation in terms of lip aperture depending on (i) the speech mode (normal speech vs. whispered speech where f0 is absent), (ii) the visibility of the interlocutor (visible vs. invisible), and (iii) the pragm...

Consonants are a major class of sounds occurring in all human languages. The main goal of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the basic articulatory and aerodynamic mechanisms of consonant production and their main acoustic consequences. The chapter is structured according to four phonological classification criteria: airstream mechanisms, v...

Various studies have reported links between physical activity and enhanced cognitive performance in certain areas. Yet fewer studies have examined whether the cognitive process of speech production is affected by contexts of movement and, if so, at which linguistic levels. This pilot study starts by investigating the level of speech sounds, asking...

Many theories have been put forward to explain how different sound systems evolved. Whether differences in vocal tract shape play a role has so far remained unclear. Dediu et al. document subtle differences among four broad ethnolinguistic groups. Using computer simulations, they demonstrate how differences can be amplified over time, leading to di...

The investigation of the speech planning processes, in particular the timing between acoustic and articulatory onset, has recently received a lot of attention. Respiration has not been considered in this process so far, although it is involved and may be well coordinated with the oral articulators prior and at the onset of the utterance. In light o...

Purpose This study evaluated how 1st and 2nd vowel formant frequencies (F1, F2) differ between normal and loud speech in multiple speaking tasks to assess claims that loudness leads to exaggerated vowel articulation. Method Eleven healthy German-speaking women produced normal and loud speech in 3 tasks that varied in the degree of spontaneity: rea...

The iconic cross-modal correspondence between fundamental frequency and location in vertical space ("high is up") has long been described in the literature. However, an explanation for this relationship has not been proposed. We conducted an experiment in which participants shot at cans projected on the wall in different vertical positions. We foun...

Louder speech is primarily associated with greater respiratory system driving pressures, but several studies have indicated that speakers may also adjust their laryngeal settings in louder speech. In combination, these observations suggest the possibility of a tradeoff between respiratory and laryngeal mechanisms for increasing loudness, but little...

While the general assumption has long been that natural languages exhibit an arbitrary pairing of form and meaning, there is increasing empirical evidence that iconicity in language is not uncommon. One example from spoken language involves iconic prosodic modulation, i.e. the changing of prosodic features such as duration and fundamental frequency...

This study explores short-term respiratory volume changes in German oral and nasal stops and discusses to what extent these changes may be explained by laryngeal-oral coordination. It is expected that respiratory volumes decrease more rapidly when the glottis and the vocal tract are open after the release of voiceless aspirated stops. Two experimen...

The aims of the study are to investigate acoustic, aerodynamic and supralaryngeal properties of the voicing contrast in Turkish and to better understand the relation between these factors in the maintenance and inhibition of phonetic voicing. For this purpose, simultaneous recordings were carried out using electropalatography, a piezoresistive pres...

Louder speech, relative to typical speech, may show changes in addition to the expected increased SPL, such as higher values of the first formant (F1), longer durations, and higher articulatory velocities. Most past work has assessed vowel midpoints only. To what extent can any formant differences be observed across the full time course of the vowe...

Laughter has rarely been examined in the context of a romantic attraction between conversational partners. This study aims to fill the gap by investigating laughter in the context of speed dating. We present a preliminary analysis of spontaneous laughs produced by male and female speakers who were more or less attracted to each other, and discuss v...

Robotics and automatization have become a part of our everyday life. This often involves locating and moving objects in space, hence spatial expressions are of great importance for any human-machine interface. Improper interpretation of spatial terms, for instance in medicine, can have enormous consequences. Thus, it is important to understand how...

The present acoustic and articulatory study focuses on the articulatory behavior in English and German during silent pauses between two prosodic phrases (IP) in a reading situation. The first results for German data confirm previous findings on the temporal aspects of speech preparation using a larger speaker sample and a large temporal precision....

The present study investigates the articulatory behaviour during inter-speech pauses between two prosodic phrases (IP) in a reading task by means of EMA. The differences between acoustic and articulatory pause duration as well as the delay between the onsets were analysed within varying phonetic contexts. To gain further insights into motor plannin...

Prosodic characteristics of older adults are highly individual, which is why longitudinal data appear to be more suited to mapping age-specific developments rather than a comparison of age groups. Using interviews featuring spontaneous speech, conducted in two waves nine to ten years apart, five German and five French speakers are evaluated. The tr...

In this brief overview I review how our understanding of speech variation has changed over the last decades. I argue that depending on the motivation of the scientific investigations and the theoretical points of view, variation has been discussed with respect to biological, social and communicative factors as well as with respect to the nonlineari...

An English blogger corpus was used to investigate letter replication as a phenomenon of prosodic emphasis in analogy to spoken language. All letters that occurred at least three times in successive order were selected. Our findings show that some letters, particularly vowels and sonorants, are favored while letters corresponding to stops were less...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Past studies of speech breathing have observed short-term variations in the respiratory signal. In early kinematic work, Stetson observed “ripples“ on the breathing signals, which he interpreted to represent chest pulses for each syllable. Ladefoged and coauthors subsequently reported that brief excursions in respiratory d...

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Does handedness influence pointing gestures? Within the scope of our study, we investigated the influence of handedness, in this case dominant vs. non-dominant hand, on pointing gestures in Polish counting-out rhymes under two conditions: fast and normal speech. For this, pointing gestures of the index finger were recorded with a motion capture sys...

The present study aims to approach soft ‘g’, a highly disputable sound in Turkish phonetics and phonology, from a multidimensional perspective by (i) analysing its historical development, (ii) investigating its distribution in a dictionary of Modern Turkish, and (iii) studying its acoustic realization. In the Ottoman script soft ‘g’ was represented...

We investigated the stability of the relationship between number of syllables and pointing gestures under different speech rate constraints. Participants of the study realized Polish counting out rhymes at normal and fast speech rates. Pointing gestures of the apex finger were recorded with a motion capture system and speech acoustics were recorded...

This study investigates orofacial expressions, i.e., lip aperture and the movement of eyebrows in the production of German polar (yes/no) questions and statements. It also examines the production of these sentence types in normal versus whispered speech mode. For these purposes, a motion capture experiment was carried out with simultaneous acoustic...

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Many previous studies have investigated how increased loudness affects speech production behavior, but authors have varied widely in the measures they have used, and few studies have systematically assessed relationships among respiratory, laryngeal, and acoustic measures. In this work, we present respiratory and aerodynamic (intraoral pressure) da...

This study investigates whether acoustic correlates of prominence are related to actions of the respiratory system resulting in local changes of subglottal pressure (Psub). Simultaneous recordings were made of acoustics; intraoral pressure (Pio), as an estimate of Psub; and thoracic and abdominal volume changes. Ten German speakers read sentences c...

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