Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Availability

Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Listening--Physiological effect; Men--Physiology; Respiration--Regulation; Academic theses;

Abstract

Covert speech movements have been observed to increase with linguistic complexity during listening tasks. This study investigated the presence of covert respiratory movements during listening tasks of increasing complexity to answer the following research questions: 1. Do normal adult male listeners aged fifty and above without central nervous system injury change from rest breathing patterns to speech breathing patterns while listening to passages of increasing complexity; 2. Is there a greater shift towards speech breathing while listening to passages of greater complexity? Chest wall kinematics often male participants were obtained and analyzed for significant changes from rest breathing during four separate trials of listening to passages of varied complexity. Participants were aged 50+ years old with no history of neurological disease, cerebral vascular attack, or uncontrolled hypertension. All participants were native English speakers, free from respiratory infections, and were required to pass a hearing screening. Movements of the pulmonary-chest wall unit were transposed using Respiratory Inductance Plethysmograph bands into wave-form graphic representations of volume/time displays for analysis. Respiratory patterns ( e.g., inspiratory and expiratory durations) were subjected to a repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOV A; SPSS, 2007). No statistically significant differences occurred in respiratory patterns across trials ranging in complexity. Subject performance was evenly distributed, and no interaction effect existed. An unexpected finding was the high consistency of breathing patterns across tasks. The investigation revisited the issue of covert respiratory musculature activity supporting speech and confirmed with the findings of Reynolds and Lyon (1976), but did not support the findings of McFarland (2001 ). These findings suggest that either the elicitation of covert respiratory speech activity requires more complex stimuli or dyadic conversations.

Year of Submission

2008

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

First Advisor

Todd Bohnenkamp

Second Advisor

Carlin Hageman

Third Advisor

John Ophus

Comments

If you are the rightful copyright holder of this thesis and wish to have it removed from the Open Access Collection, please submit a request to scholarworks@uni.edu and include clear identification of the work, preferably with URL.

Date Original

2008

Object Description

1 PDF file (56 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

Share

COinS