Understanding the temporal organization of articulatory and respiratory events prior to speech initiation is crucial for encoding the complexities of speech planning and speech production. This study builds on a pilot study (Rasskazova et al. 2019), which demonstrated temporal alignment between oral articulators and exhalation onset for alveolar consonants of 6 speakers. In the current study, we investigate 11 speakers, five initial segments and two sentence conditions: utterance-initial silent interval and inter-speech pauses. Our results indicate a tight coupling between the onset of exhalation with the velocity peak of the closing gesture and the nucleus onset of the initial segment, shown by latencies with very low variability. This suggests a synchronized timing between respiratory and articulatory events. Preparatory events were more variable during utterance-initial positions compared to inter-speech pauses.