Breathing in Conversation: An Unwritten History

This paper attempts to draw attention of the multimodal communication research community to what we consider a long overdue topic, namely respiratory activity in conversation. We submit that a turn towards spontaneous interaction is a natural extension of the recent interest in speech breathing, and is likely to offer valuable insights into mechanisms underlying organisation of interaction and collaborative human action in general, as well as to make advancement in existing speech technology applications. Particular focus is placed on the role of breathing as a perceptually and interactionally salient turn-taking cue. We also present the recording setup developed in the Phonetics Laboratory at Stockholm University with the aim of studying communicative functions of physiological and audio-visual breathing correlates in spontaneous multiparty interactions.