Informative sound patterns in speech

Abstract

As the Board of the Society for Signifies kindly invited me to read a paper concerning informative sound patterns in speech, I had to think about the subject. The question arose whether also non-informative sound patterns may be supposed to be present in speech. I hardly could believe so, taking information in a general sense, indicating the possibility of information, for behaviour as a whole gives information to other individuals, especially to those belonging to the same group. However it is a well known fact that in defining information more scientifically, an important part of the sound patterns in speech has to be called redundant, non informative. Then another question arose: what is meant by the word pattern? I supposed that a pattern is to be recognized if two qualities are combined more than once in a similar way and it seemed to me that the word is used especially for two dimensional combinations. Here we have to remember that Peterson in 1952 spoke of energy-time-frequency patterns and that he needed a tridimensional scheme for the characteristics of vowels, as Black in a different way had wanted before. However this may be, if the word pattern would indicate two dimensional combinations, the role of phonetics at once might become clear, as phonet ical records generally are two dimensional, representing e.g. intensity plotted on a time abscis (rhythmic patterns) or pitch plotted on a time abscis (melodic patterns) and timbre patterns in which intensity and pitch of the components of a sound are combined. Though the sound patterns in speech are fully comparable to other sound patterns, we cannot forget that they are also a link in the whole of energetic patterns, that are transmitted in the process of speech. Images arising in the central nervous system of the speaker and perhaps in more than one part of it at the same moment, give rise to neuromuscular patterns, that are transferred into sound patterns, the latter reaching the membrana tympani, leading to sensoric nervous patterns, which reaching the central nervous system of the hearer end in images, corre