Respiratory particle super-emissive Italian words and effect of articulation manner during children speaking

Abstract

Speaking represents one of the most occurrence respiratory activities influencing the airborne transmission of respiratory pathogens. To date, the positive correlation between the amplitude of human speech and respiratory particles emitted is proven, but information about the effect of articulation manner on the respiratory particle emission is weakly investigated. The few existing studies involves adults and languages other than Italian. To fill this gap of knowledge, this study analyzed the words affecting the most the respiratory particle emission, here named “super-emissive”, and the effect of the articulation manner of consonants on disyllabic words. To achieve this goal, 10 children reading an Italian phonetically balanced word list (at “speaking” and “loudly speaking” voice intensity levels) were analyzed. The findings of this study are of great interest since that, for the first time, are focused on children during Italian speaking. The main results evidence that some words exceed the average concentration level within a given speech compared to others. This can be due to the word length, as in “Nabucodonosor” in which several phonemes fall into the unit of time, but also can be dependent on the articulation manner of consonants. Indeed, an in-depth analysis of disyllabic words containing the same type of consonants revealed that affricates due to their composition, as in “ciccio”, are responsible for the highest emission of respiratory particles respect to nasals, fricatives, approximants and occlusives.