Kluge by Gary Marcus

Author:Gary Marcus [Marcus, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2009-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

The peculiar nature of our articulatory system and how it evolved, leads to one more consequence: the relation between sound waves and phonemes (the smallest distinct speech sounds, such as /s/ and /ā/) is far more complicated than it needs to be. Just as our pronunciation of a given sequence of letters depends on its linguistic context (think of how you say ough when reading the title of Dr. Seuss's book The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough), the way in which we produce a particular linguistic element depends on the sounds that come before it and after it. For example, the sound /s/ is pronounced in one way in the word see (with spread lips) but in another in the word sue (with rounded lips). This makes learning to talk a lot more work than it might otherwise be. (It's also part of what makes computerized voice-recognition a difficult problem.)

Why such a complex system? Here again, evolution is to blame; once it locked us into producing sounds by articulatory choreography, the only way to keep up the speed of communication was to cut corners. Rather than produce every phoneme as a separate, distinct element (as a simple computer modem would), our speech system starts preparing sound number two while it's still working on sound number one. Thus, before I start uttering the h in happy, my tongue is already scrambling into position in anticipation of the a. When I'm working on a, my lips are already getting ready for the pp, and when I'm on pp, I'm moving my tongue in preparation for the y.

This dance keeps the speed up, but it requires a lot of practice and can complicate the interpretation of the message.* What's good for muscle control isn't necessarily good for a listener. If you should mishear John Fogerty's "There's a bad moon on the rise" as "There's a bathroom on the right,"† so be it. From the perspective of evolution, the speech system, which works most of the time, is good enough, and that's all that matters.

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