ABSTRACT
Speech, like most skilled movements, is best described as goal directed activity, but it is not clear how the goals are defined. One possibility has been outlined by proponents of Articulatory Phonology (Browman & Goldstein, 1986, 1992; Saltzman & Kelso, 1987, int. al.), They suggest that the goals are a series of articulatory gestures, being careful to point out that we must distinguish between the higher level gestural goals and the lower level system that implements them. When you produce a word (e.g., cat) their notion is that the speech centers in the brain do not issue instructions for the use of particular muscles. Instead, they issue instructions equivalent to: “Make the following complex gestures: Voiceless aspirated velar stop, follow this by a low front vowel, finally make a voiceless glottaled alveolar stop,” in which different parts specify goals for different parts of the speech mechanism. “Voiceless aspirated” is an instruction for a certain laryngeal gesture, “velar stop” a lingual gesture, and so on.
