The Many Words of Speech

Before reading the Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz articles, I took speech for granted, because I don't consciously think about phonetics while talking to people or interpreting what they're saying.  I began to suspect there was a little more to the story after seeing how much Siri struggled to understand the simple sentences we read to her in Thursday's class, but I had no idea there was such a precise way of describing every sound in our language!

The Gussenhoven reading focused on speech from an anatomical perspective.  The passage felt kind of like a vocabulary dump—almost like reading the glossary in the back of a textbook—but I nonetheless found myself understanding each element of speech through a combination of reading what was written and physically experimenting with the provided examples.  For instance, when Gussenhoven discussed the soft palate and the hard palate, I touched the tip of my tongue to each and saw that the soft palate really did feel softer than the hard palate.  And to better understand what a nasal was, I actually raised my soft palate with my tongue and tried saying "hi."  I sounded like someone with a very bad cold, which I must say was rather amusing!  So I definitely learned a lot about the English language from Gussenhoven, though my favorite part of the passage was the section on nonpulmonic consonants.  I found this section a bit puzzling, since Gussenhoven didn't provide any words for readers to sound out, which is perhaps why it intrigued me.  I'd be interested to actually hear an African language with clicks, for instance—I wonder how many different types of clicks there are and, more importantly, whether I'd be able to tell the difference between them as an English speaker.

The Kenstowicz reading relied heavily on the vocabulary from Gussenhoven, which made it somewhat difficult to understand since all the terms were so new to me.  As I saw it, the piece was written to demonstrate how a single phoneme like "t" consists of many distinct allophones, like the glottal stop t in water and aspirated t in time.  Before this passage, I just accepted that a t was a t, but it now bothers me a little that all those allophones are hidden from average speakers.  Anyway, I really appreciated being able to apply the list of terms that Gussenhoven provided to an actual classification challenge like the letter t.  I also found it interesting how Kenstowicz formulated rules to describe linguistic features like flapping, and I wondered whether these rules were unique to English or could be applied to all languages from around the world.  I also wondered how the rules could apply to our speech outside the realm of linguistics.  As Kenstowicz pointed out, speech is largely unconscious, so I wouldn't advocate for teaching these rules in classrooms.  After all, they are completely unnecessary for effectively communicating with people.  But might a basic understanding of the rules help us communicate more effectively with speech recognition software like Siri?  Maybe the issue Siri had with understanding our speech was that she is programmed with these rules that most users simply don't understand.