From Human Biology to Meaning

Having done deep neural network research on automatic speech recognition this summer, the approaches to 1) understanding the actual mechanics behind human production of sound in the Gussenhoven reading and 2) the specific rules governing the world of phonetics and phonology in the Kenstowicz reading was a fresh and fascinating perspective into the study of linguistics, generalized across all languages and cultures from a scientific angle.

The reading by Gussenhoven provided an in-depth explanation as to how humans mechanically and anatomically produce sound. From the initial breathing of air into the lungs to create a pressure difference, and then releasing that air through the larynx and the vocal tract and vibrating the vocal chords to finally produce a single sound, there was an interesting connection to be made between the biological aspect of the process of producing sound and the actual part where humans create meaning (language) with that sound. We don’t usually think of our physical organs when we hear language being spoken, but in reality there is a strong interdisciplinary link between the seemingly disparate domains of human biology and linguistics.

The Kenstowicz reading on the other hand, emphasized hidden but important aspects of speech which humans do not consciously process in everyday language. For instance, the example of [t] having eight different pronunciations ties back to our class discussion when coming up with various “allophones”, or variants, of the same “phoneme”, or underlying sound. This resulted in a new branch of linguistics called phonology was developed as a result of these “collective phonetic illusions”. This made me realize that the world of linguistics is so much more complex than I had originally imagined--there exists so many puzzles where the rules in pronouncing phonemes across different languages vary so greatly, even in the English language itself, and that a new branch of linguistics is warranted to further perform serious, scientific analysis in answering these open-ended questions.

Both the Gussenhoven and the Kenstowicz readings, although the focus areas different, provided key insights that bridged the two readings for me. They opened my eyes to the idea of linguistics being a natural glue that unites all humans around the world. No matter how different and foreign looking or sounding their language is, linguistics always has a “universal language” to represent any sound. We can use this general language to further perform analysis on languages, have a systematic way of comparing languages, and finally, decode the underlying structure that is common to all languages.