ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes a broad range of data, consistent with the primacy of hearing for shaping the principal properties of spoken language. It highlights how information acts as a controlling factor in defining many properties of spoken language. Language can be approached from many different vantage points-neuroanatomy, psychology, phonetics, hearing, vision, physics, information theory, and formal logic. Certain languages, such as Spanish, lend themselves easily to Roman orthography; these tongues have a relatively transparent grapheme-to-phoneme relationship-words are pronounced pretty much as they are spelled and with some measure of consistency. Multitier theory turns the conventional phonetic framework on its head. Multitier theory predicts this, as it interprets the McGurk effect as the consequence of inherently ambiguous acoustic cues. Linking the information-processing component of speech communication with its biological foundations is likely to form the focus of spoken language research over the coming decades.
