The Hidden Intricacies of Speech

The Gussenhover reading gives us a biological perspective on speech production, discussing the roles of the organs of speech - parts of the body in the larynx and the vocal tract involved in speech production. He mentions that the primary function of these so called organs of “speech” is actually not speech production but it is to serve “primary biological functions relating to our respiratory system and the processing of food”. For example, the purpose of vocal fold flaps is to prevent food and saliva from entering the lungs. The reading made me think that speech production may have evolved as a spandrel. But then again thinking about how some animals use speech to communicate danger - such as in prairie dogs by having different alarm calls for different species of predators - made me question this thought. Surely, the ability to use speech in this manner increases the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce and hence would be considered a favorable trait in natural selection and not merely a spandrel trait.

Another point I found interesting from this reading is the existence of languages called tone languages in which different pitch patterns are used to distinguish words from one another in the same way vowels and consonants are used in all languages. Since I have not been exposed to these languages much, I always assumed that people change their pitch to add a declarative or an interrogative meaning to their utterance. However, listening to a few friends speaking Thai to one another, I have been confused at times as to why one does not respond to the question of the other. But now I guess, my friend was probably not asking a question!

It is interesting to think that there are so many intricate aspects of speech, such as pitch and tone, that help us impart meaning but are subconscious to native speakers. For me, English is my second language and almost every time I meet someone new, he/she comments on my accent. So I found the part in the Kenstowicz reading explaining how native English speakers find accents to be particularly interesting. Native speakers often judge sounds that are phonetically distinct to be identical. For example, the coronal stop [t] can have as many as eight distinct pronunciations. Allophones of a phoneme are “the product of systematic rules that modify the segment depending on the context in which it finds itself”. If native speakers can’t distinguish the difference between the pronunciations, then how can they hear my accent? Kenstowicz says that native speakers are generally unconscious of these rules but when they hear someone speak without following the rules, they notice how “funny” the person sounds. This funny way of speaking is called having an accent.