Gussenhoven gives a good overall view of the speech production mechanism and how it is used throughout certain aspects of speech across languages (mainly English but he includes some others for comparison). One of my favorite parts of this reading was the section on pitch, because pitch is something that fascinates me. The fact that you can be pronouncing all of the letters correctly and yet still come across as a complete foreigner means that the pitch of a sentence holds a lot of weight, and often when speaking a foreign language, even if I might not know what all of the words mean, if someone says the sentence with the correct pitch (i.e. like a question, or a declarative sentence) I can often deduce what the words that I don't know mean, or at least get the overall gist of the sentence.
Kenstowicz goes into more detail about how many native speakers use the same pronunciation when saying different words (he gives the example of tents and tends). I found this to be interesting because Kenstowicz talks about how the certain structures of our mouths are behaving when saying these words and it got me thinking. No one teaches us how to move our mouth in order to speak, certainly there's some essence of following what you're parent was doing (i.e. how their "mouth"-- more like cheeks--was moving) but no one teaches us how to vibrate our vocal chords or exactly how to position our teeth, tongue and lips when pronouncing an "s" or a "p". Therefore how I pronounce an "s" might be different then the way you pronounce an "s" yet we still get the same general sound across. Similarly when learning to say "tents" and "tends" we might not be using our vocal structures the same for each word, but we know that everyone around us says "tents" and "tends" the same so therefore we should say them that way.
Overall, it is becoming more and more evident that our speech is socially determined, and that socially defined speech can often tell you so much about a person (where there from, who they hang out with, etc). I never realized the way we talk could be such an integral part of who we are.
Hey Cody!
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting how you talk about the fact that we are not really taught how to move our mouth or position our teeth when we learn to speak. I think this is a key reason for why as native speakers, we often are unaware of variations in sound. Perhaps it's because we learn from such a young age by hearing and seeing how our parents speak, as you said. It's interesting to then think about learning a foreign language, which we usually do at a later age and therefore we are much more conscious of the details about speaking. Having spent time working on my foreign language skills in the native countries where the languages are spoken, I totally agree with you that our speech is determined a lot by our social surroundings. After using the language in the native countries, I started to become more like the locals and less conscious of how I pronounce every word, just like I am in English.
I'm glad you noted how significant it is that our speech is socially determined and I hope we learn more about that in class!