Forthcoming: Speech during exercise: Adaptation and variability in production

Heather Weston

Synopsis

Much of human communication occurs while people are moving, exerting themselves, or otherwise not at rest, yet speech production in such contexts has received little systematic attention. Previous studies have typically addressed respiration, phonation, or articulation separately, making it difficult to characterize changes in speech production as a whole. This book presents a multi-level investigation of speech during controlled physical activity. Combining respiratory data, acoustic analysis, and speaker reports, it examines how different exercise levels affect breathing patterns, phonation, and articulatory realization. The analyses reveal adjustments across all production levels, but no uniform production mode: speakers show distinct patterns of response under the same physical workload. By integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence, the book highlights the role of between-speaker variability for understanding speech behavior under real-life conditions. The findings inform models of speech production and variability, and they support a broader view of speech as a dynamically coordinated system that adapts across changing bodily states.

Author Biography

Heather Weston

Heather Weston studied linguistics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Universität Potsdam, focusing on Bantu languages and articulatory phonology. She received her PhD in Linguistics from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, conducting research at the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) and the University of Cambridge to investigate speech production during physical activity. Her research integrates experimental phonetics with physiological perspectives to explore interactions between linguistic and bodily processes. She is particularly interested in how speech varies across real-world conditions and works at the intersection of research and technology, translating research insights into applied contexts.

bookcover

Published

February 20, 2026
LaTeX source on GitHub

Print ISSN

2363-5576
Cite as
Weston, Heather. Forthcoming. Speech during exercise: Adaptation and variability in production. (Studies in Laboratory Phonology). Berlin: Language Science Press.

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.