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 of these considerations, we investigated the
... [Show full abstract] temporal coordination between acoustic, respiratory and articulatory events prior to utterance onset. For this purpose 12 native speakers of German have been recorded with Electromagnetic Articulography and Inductance Plethysmogra-phy reading sentences that were controlled for length and stress of the first word. The initial segment of the utterance was either /t/ or /n/. The results for six speakers so far indicate that early speech preparation consists of mouth opening during the inhalation phase. The onset of expiration seems to be tightly coupled with the acoustic and the articulatory onset, particularly with the constriction interval of the tongue tip gesture in the first segment. Manner of articulation of the initial segment seems to affect the temporal fine-tuning of preparatory events.