15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Two Experiments on Oxygen Consumption During Speech Production: Vocal Effort and Speaking Tempo

Seung-Jae Moon (1), Björn Lindblom (2)

(1) AJOU University, Korea
(2) Stockholms Universitet, Sweden

We report the results of two experiments on oxygen (O2) use during speech: In the first, subjects were asked to count repeatedly to eight, in step with a metronome beat, at three vocal efforts: soft, normal and loud. In the second, they produced the syllable [sa] in synchrony with the beats at two speaking rates: normal and it fast. O2 consumption was found to rise as a function of vocal effort for all subjects. Secondly, for all subjects, O2 consumption increased when vocal effort was constant but speed of articulatory movement (number syllables per second) was doubled. Energy costs are small for speech. The method employed does not have the time resolution that experimental phoneticians normally work with. However, it is possible to compensate for those circumstances to some extent by collecting the data over a large time window.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Moon, Seung-Jae / Lindblom, Björn (2003): "Two experiments on oxygen consumption during speech production: vocal effort and speaking tempo", In ICPhS-15, 3129-3132.