Oral Communication

January 27, 2020

Speech Production

Speech production is the process through which spoken words are selected to be produced and
have their phonetics formulated and then finally articulated by the motor system in the vocal
apparatus. Speech production can be spontaneous such as the words of a conversation. Speech
production is not the same as language production since language can also be produced
manually by signs. In ordinary flowing(fluent?) conversations, people pronounce each second
roughly four syllables, 10/12 phonemes and two or three words out of a vocabulary that can
contain 10,000 to 100,000 words.

Errors in speech production are relatively rare occurring at a rate of once in every 900 words in
spontaneous speech. Words that are commonly spoken or learned early in life or easily imagined
are quicker to say than those that are rarely said learnt later in life or abstract.

Normally speech is created with pulmonary pressure provided by the lungs that generates
sounds by formation in the glottis, in the larynx, that then is modified by the vocal tract into
different vowels and consonants. However, speech production can occur without the use of the
lungs and glottis in a laryngeal by using the upper parts of the vocal trait. An example of such a
laryngeal speech is Donald duck.

Vocal production of speech can be associated with the production of synchronized hand gestures
that act to enhance the comprehensibility of what is being said.

Nasal Cavity
The lips
Jaw
The palate
Oral cavity
The tongue
Larynx
Epiglottis
Pharynx
Stages of Speech Production
There are three major levels of processing:
Initiation- This is the moment that the air is expelled from the lungs, in English, speech sounds
are the result of a “pulmonic” egressive air stream, although that is not the case in all languages
(ingressive sounds like Dutch). The first is the processes of conceptualization/conceptual
preparation, in which the intention to crat speech links a desired concept to a particular spoken
word to be expressed. Here the preverbal intended messages are formulated that specify the
concepts to be verbally expressed.
Phonation – The second stage is formulation in which the linguistic form required for the
expression of the desired message is created. This includes grammatical encoding, marpho-
phonological encoding and phonetic encoding. Grammatical encoding is the process of selecting
the appropriate syntactic word or lemna. The selected lemna then activates the appropriate
syntactic frame for the conceptualized message. Morpho-phonological encoding is the process of
braking words down into syllables to be produced in overt speech. This syllabification is
dependent on the preceeding and proceeding words. The final part of the formulation stage is
phonetic encoding. This involves the activation of articulatory gestures dependent on the
syllables selected in the morpho-phonological process, creating an articulatory score as the
utterance is pieced together and the order of movements of the vocal apparatus is completed.
The phonation process occurs at the larynx. The larynx has two horizontal folds of tissue in the
passage of air. The are the vocal folds. The gap between these folds is called the glottis.
Articulation – It is the execution the articulatory score by the lungs, glottis, larynx resulting in
overt speech.