Influence of Different Walking Speeds on Speech

The objective of this paper is to examine the effect of different walking speeds on concurrent speech tasks. Entrainment of talking to walking would support a model in which speech production planning is governed by coupled oscillators as proposed by Articulatory Phonology and Task Dynamics. The experimental design involved a walking-while-talking paradigm with three different gait velocities (normal, fast, slow) and two different speech tasks – reading aloud and repeated syllable production. Participants were 32 adults between 18 and 32 (mean age 22.5 ± 2.9 years) with no neurological, physiological, or psychological conditions impacting speech and/or gait. Results indicated that walking speed significantly affected speech measures in both tasks, but the effect size was considerably smaller for talking than gait. The effect of gait velocity was numerically much greater in the Syllable condition than in the Prose condition. This may show entrainment of talking to walking, supporting an oscillatory model of speech production. But the model would need to explain why speech did not change to the same extent as gait. Conversely, non-oscillatory models need to account for the fact that walking speed influenced speech in the first place.