Understanding What We Say

The Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz papers worked well together in providing a deeper introduction into speech and speech perception. Gussenhoven focused mainly on the physical aspects behind the production of speech. He delves into what causes the creation of sound, describing the role that the lungs have on maintaining and generating changes in air pressure, how the opening and closing of the glottis produces a large number of consonants, and how the vibrating of our vocal cords is what drives our voices.  All of these can be manipulated to create three unique types of phonation: whisper, breathy, and creaky voice. Whispering occurs when the vocal cords are brought together to increase friction when air flows. The breathy voice is produced when one speaks but the glottis remains open throughout, causing air to constantly flow out of the body. And lastly, the creaky voice results from an extreme tightening of the vocal cords, allowing each opening/closing to sound as if it was an individual event.

The Kenstowicz paper disregards the anatomical aspects of speech and focuses more on how humans understand words and sentences once they are actually spoken. He explains that many letters have several different pronunciations given the word they are being used in, which forces the speaker to follow certain rules of speech. For example, when analyzing the [t] sound, it can phonetically be misinterpreted for the [D] sound. When speaking, ‘tends’ and ‘tents’ are pronounced so similarly that in fluid conversation, it would be hard to distinguish between the two. Kenstowicz then explains that this leads to unspoken rules within each language that should be followed in order to be understood correctly.

The interesting thing about reading these two paper is, especially in the Kenstowicz paper, that I read most of it aloud, sounding out the different words to see whether the differences he was referring to where actually audible. They were, and it immediately reminded me of little children reading their picture books following their finger word by word as they pronounce them slowly. So many times, as younger children are beginning to learn to read, they are taught that each letter has a sound and in order to read words, you put each letter’s sound together. However, they quickly find out that the sum of the parts does not make up the whole; there is so much more to the words than just the individual sounds crammed together. Words like ‘knight’, ‘lamb’, ‘daughter’, ‘half’ were constant struggles for the kids. Why not just write ‘lamb’ without the ‘b’? English written and oral language have massive discrepancies making them more complicated than one would initially imagine. But why is that so? Do we say ‘tends’ and ‘tents’ similarly just because we are too lazy to properly articulate the difference, and if so, why have we allowed laziness to convolute our methods of communication?