How We Produce Speech

These two papers from Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz provide an introduction to phonetics and phonology, and provide a complementary pairing about how we recognize linguistic structures and produce speech. Gussenhoven approaches speech production from a biological point of view, looking at the parts of the body that aid us in the task, while Kenstowicz gives a theoretical foundation on phonology, pointing out rules of American English and presenting several fascinating abnormalities in how speakers recognize and pronounce certain phonemes.

Gussenhoven's paper starts by giving in-depth descriptions of the lungs, larynx, glottis, vocal cords, pharynx, nasal cavity, and more, highlighting how they work together to produce speech. He then goes into different kinds of sounds (vowels, constrictions, consonants, etc.) and how they are produced using these systems. I was most interested in his section on stresses in language, especially how English consists of mainly left-dominant feet. I was surprised by this because of my experience reading and performing Shakespeare, who wrote in verse called iambic pentameter -- that is, each line consists of five feet, and each foot by default is stressed on the second syllable. To put it another way, even though Shakespeare's feet usually consist of syllables from different words (and therefore are slightly different than what Gussenhoven is writing about), it seems he was able to find a way to re-frame left-dominant phrases as right-dominant through his choice of words and word order to create iambic verse.

Kenstowicz takes these bio-anatomical concepts and grounds them by transitioning into talking about phonology, or the study of phonemes. The distinction between phonology and phonetics (the main topic of Gussenhoven's paper) is made clear when Kenstowicz writes that even sounds that are phonetically the same are phonologically different (to paraphrase Kenstowicz's example, "tents" and "tends" are parsed as different words even though they consist of the same sounds). In fact, most of this paper focuses on an interesting example of this, the eight ways that English speakers pronounce the letter [t]. I was fascinated by what Kenstowicz called "collective phonetic illusions," such as the phonetic difference between "writer" and "rider" being not the [d] vs the [t], but the length of the [i] before it.

Something that was on my mind while reading both papers was how these aspects of pronunciation can change over time. In my personal experience, for most of my childhood, I always pronounced all of my hard t's -- "waTer", "buTTer", "mounTain", etc. At some point, I stopped doing so, and I now pronounce all of these t's in the way that Kenstowicz describes them. Did something biologically happen as I developed? Was it that I heard more and more people pronouncing hard t's the other way? These questions were on my mind while doing the reading...