The Effect of Exposure to High Altitude and Heat on Speech Articulatory Coordination

The effects of altitude and heat on speech articulatory coordination following exercise and approximately three hours of exposure are explored. Recordings of read speech and free response speech before and after exercise in moderate altitude, moderate heat and both moderate altitude and heat are analyzed using features that characterize articulatory coordination. It is found that 1) moderate altitude causes small changes and moderate heat negligible changes to articulatory coordination features after brief exposure prior to exercise; 2) moderate altitude and heat produce similar large feature changes following exercise and longer exposure; 3) moderate altitude and heat produce larger feature changes in combination than individually immediately following exercise. Finally, using cross-validation training of a statistical classifiers, the features are sufficient to classify the four experimental conditions with an overall accuracy of 0.50 and to detect the presence of any one of the experimental conditions with an accuracy of 0.90.