Three semiotic layers of spoken communication

Abstract

My background as a phonetician has been more in speech production than perception, but it is never fully possible to deal with one without continually referring to the other. The papers in this volume by Coleman (2003) and Hawkins (2003) fit closely with the related one on phonetics by Local (2003), also in this volume; so I make reference to all the three, as I discuss what I see to be the necessary embedding of the study of the perception of spoken language in the wider study of interactional communication. I take the metatheoretical view that the constructs of linguistic and phonetic theory which propose analytic categories are convenient fictions, whose convenience for the given purpose temporarily outweighs the evident distortion of the artificiality they introduce. The risk is that one progressively forgets about the distortion associated with these basic categories, and the temporary distortion becomes a habitual conceptual straitjacket. Happily, the disadvantage of this artificiality normally grows, ultimately, to the point where the convenience of the original constructs is realized as no longer profitable. Revision ensues, and a new (temporarily more satisfactory) set of fictions is proposed. Thus science moves forward, and we have probably now reached the point where it is desirable to move beyond local, punctual, short-domain evidence in speech routinely to consider longer-domain and more detailed phenomena for their relevance to both production and perception. In this commentary, I leave aside the very distributed nature of phonetic information about the identity of linguistic units such as individual phonemes, taking it for granted that Hawkins, Coleman and Local have all demonstrated this beyond challenge. I note in passing, however, that the long anticipation of some types of speech sounds demonstrated in these three excellent papers will bring into re-examination some of the conclusions on self-monitoring for speech errors. The rest of my comments concentrate on the need to set the study of the perception of spoken language in a wider context. I feel very sympathetic to Local’s (2003) position when he says that ‘‘Spoken language is a resource which is systematically deployed in the management of social interaction, its primary site ARTICLE IN PRESS