ABSTRACT
Speech is the result of a highly complicated series of events. The communication in sound of such a simple concept as ‘It’s raining’ involves a number of activities on the part of the speaker. In the first place, the formulation of the concept will take place in the brain; the first stage may, therefore, be said to be psychological or psycholinguistic. The nervous system transmits this message to the organs of speech which will produce a particular pattern of sound; thus the second important stage for our purposes is articulatory or physiological. The movement of our organs of speech will create disturbances in the air; these varying air pressures may be investigated and they constitute the third stage in our chain, the physical or acoustic. Since communication generally requires a listener as well as a speaker, these stages will be reversed at the listening end: the sound waves will be received by the hearing apparatus and information transmitted along the nervous system to the brain, where the linguistic interpretation of the message takes place. Phonetic analysis has often ignored the role of the listener. But any investigation of speech as communication must ultimately be concerned with both the production and the reception ends.
