Abstract
Intelligible speakers achieve specific vocal tract constrictions in rapid sequence. These constrictions are associated in theory with speech motor goals. Adult-focused models of speech production assume that discrete phonological representations, sequenced into word-length plans for output, define these goals. This assumption introduces a serial order problem for speech. It is also at odds with children's speech. In particular, child phonology and timing control suggest holistic speech plans, and so the hypothesis of whole word production. This hypothesis solves the serial order problem by avoiding it. When the same solution is applied to adult speech the problem becomes how to explain the development of highly intelligible speech. This is the problem addressed here. A modeling approach is used to demonstrate how perceptual-motor units of production emerge over developmental time with the perceptual-motor integration of holistic speech plans that are also phonological representations; the specific argument is that perceptual-motor units are a product of trajectories (nearly) crossing in motor space. The model, which focuses on the integration process, defines the perceptual-motor map as a set of linked pairs of experienced perceptual and motor trajectories. The trajectories are time-based excursions through speaker-defined perceptual and motor spaces. By hypothesis, junctures appear where motor trajectories near or overlap one another in motor space when the shared (or extremely similar) articulatory configurations in these regions are exploited to combine perceptually-linked motor paths along different trajectories. Junctures form in clusters in motor space. These clusters, along with their corresponding (linked) perceptual points, represent perceptual-motor units of production, albeit at the level of speech motor control only. The units serve as pivots in motor space during speaking; they are points of transition from one motor trajectory to another along perceptually-linked paths that are selected to produce best approximations of whole word targets.
Highlights
Speech can be experienced as a sequence of discrete sounds, at least among literate adults who have used a phonemic writing system from a young age
This argument helps explain why the discrete sound units of phonology have been so useful in linguistics—because, like mathematics, they provide a tool for rigorous description
Another fundamental difference is that we explicitly address the relationship between phonology and speech motor control, and, in so doing, propose a motor phonological representation that is substantively different from the representations posited in current linguistic theory
Summary
Speech can be experienced as a sequence of discrete sounds, at least among literate adults who have used a phonemic writing system from a young age. Discrete sound units, such as phonemes, have been used by linguists to great analytic and practical advantage in work on the sound patterns of language This is because “phonemic theory provides a basis for representing the physiological time functions of speech by discrete symbolic sequences Peterson and Harary go on to explain, in the proceedings from the 12th Symposium in Applied Mathematics, that “(an) essential part of this theory is the organization of the phone, a basic phonetic unit, into higher order sets of allophones and phonemes.” They argue that the basis for treating sounds as discrete symbols, embedded in hierarchies of sets, is the mathematical theory of types and equivalence relations. The larger objective is to formalize a developmentally sensitive theory of production that limits the serial order problem in spoken language to the level of phrase production
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