![]() ![]() ![]() Overall, my time on that speech technology project was rather dispiriting. The primary object of study, it seems to me, is the signs rather than whatever movements produced them (although of course the movements have great interest in their own right). But this makes speech a sub-field of kinesiology, and draws attention away from the central fact that speech sounds are communicative signs. The great phonetician David Abercrombie declared that “Speech may be said to consist of movements made audible” – a classic statement of the articulatory view. It’s obvious that normal speaker-hearers can perceive speech correctly without simultaneously speaking, but crucially we’re not able to speak correctly without simultaneously hearing: the speech of those who lose their hearing rapidly suffers, and most of us have noticed how headphone-wearers instantly and unwittingly raise their voices – because auditory guidance is so crucial for good articulation. This is why the prelingually deaf generally don’t acquire normal speech articulation, while normal speech perception is possible for those with motor deficits. In language acquisition, perception seems broadly to precede production: we learn to articulate in order to produce the auditory-acoustic speech patterns which we have already heard and stored in our mind’s ear. But in phonetics the articulatory bias is so widespread that it’s worth pointing out that the same is true of speech. #Speech services by google download stuck how to#It’s obvious that we don’t learn to write before we learn to read: we learn the visual patterns first, then how to produce them. It was through invaluable discussions with Adrian – now Emeritus Professor of Experimental Phonetics – that I grasped the prime importance of perceptible “speech patterns” and the fundamental asymmetry between the auditory-acoustic and the articulatory branches of phonetics. I didn’t really become aware of this until the mid-late 1980s, when I was working on a speech technology project at UCL under Adrian Fourcin. But I don’t think they should be the main, still less the sole, focus of attention in phonetics. Of course the body movements involved in speaking are a valid and intriguing object of study, like the body movements involved in painting, or in drawing, or in writing. So “sounds” are depicted with cross-sectional diagrams of the head, or as lip and tongue movements, or by means of a phonetic alphabet each of whose letters is intended as an abbreviation for an articulatory description. Phonetics, for a lot of people, is mainly about questions like those in the second paragraph: less about describing speech sounds than about describing body movements which may have produced them. Or whether the artist’s fingers or wrist were more active, or the whole arm. Or if the artist held the brush between thumb and extended index finger, like a pen, or with the hand in a fist shape, with the thumb on top. You probably wouldn’t begin by asking yourself if it was painted right-handed or left-handed. Or the shapes and angles, the verticality or horizontality, the use of lines and curves. ![]() Or the picture’s composition, the balance of detail versus blocks of colour. Then you might describe the range of colours in the picture and their brightness. If you were asked to give a description of the painting above, you might first mention the subject matter – the boat, the man, the birds, the location, etc. ![]()
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