ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the internal cognitive processes which make speech encoding possible. Concepts and ideas cannot be directly communicated, and speech is perhaps the most highly developed channel for the transmission of ideational as opposed to emotional or other sorts of interpersonal messages. To understand speech production the ultimate need is to understand both conceptual messages and messages are translated into sounds. The approach to speech production outlined the views speaking as translating thoughts into sentences, words and sounds is not new. It was espoused by Wilhelm Wundt, founding psychology as an independent discipline, in his work Die s. The German neurologist Arnold Pick developed in his Aphasia a detailed 'expressionist' or 'functionalist' theory based on his experience of language disorders caused by brain injury. Wundt's theory is presented and discussed by Blumenthal, and Pick's by Butterworth. This approach has gained a fresh acceptance in the last 15 or 20 years with the reawakening of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology.
