Silent phases before speech initiation are often seen as the time-interval during which the
utterance is planned. In most studies on pauses the focus is on cognitive and linguistic
factors such as word frequencies or utterance complexity. The aim of our study is to
investigate how phonetic factors affect these silent phases. In particular we are interested
in the physiological aspects of speech initiation such as breathing, articulatory posturing and
coordination of breathing and oral gestures. Pilot studies from three areas will be presented
here: (1) the effect of breathing on reaction time, (2) the coordination of respiratory activity
and breathing during interspeech pauses and (3) the effect of answer type on gap duration in
dialogues.