Language and Speech

Drawing on research studies in (socio)linguistics, discourse analysis, and literacy, this paper provides a synthesis of findings about lexical and syntactico-semantic differences between spokken and written language, focusing on empirical research on the English language since the 1920s. The major theoretical and methodological aproaches used in comparative studies of spoken and written language are outlined and their advantages and shortcomings are critically examined. The question of how speech and writing relate to prototypical forms of language and meaning is reexamined in the light of the findings. To avoid basing generalizations about differences between speech and writing uniquely on English, suggestions for future comparative research are offered and discussed.

This paper presents a case study of a 52-year-old right-handed Thai patient with clinical and pathoanatomic evidence of major infarction in the left frontal lobe. He was studied at 4½ years poststroke with a Thai adaptation of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Exam and supplementary tests. His language characteristics included nonfluent spontaneous speech, good repetition and near-normal auditory language comprehension, similar to the syndrome called "transcortical motor aphasia." The underlying mechanism of this particular language disturbance is reviewed. It is suggested that this patient's case profile matches one of Goldstein's (1948) two types of transcortical motor aphasia.

The dynamics of vowel articulation was studied by simultaneously monitoring articulator muscle activity, movement, and acoustic output while a single speaker produced multiple repetitions of 10 different vowels in a / pVp/ environment. Analysis of the data from the three measurement levels provided a complete physiological description of the subject's vowel space and showed good agreement among the different levels of description. Intra-articulator timing measurements, e.g., the relationship between posterior genioglossus EMG activity and tongue movements, and inter-articulator timing measurements, e.g., the relationship between tongue and lip movements, indicated a differentiation in the timing of tongue movement components. Vowel-related vertical tongue movements always began at about the moments of implosion for the initial stop. Horizontal movements associated with front vowels began at the same time as vertical movements, whereas horizontal movements associated with back vowels began earlier, at the onset of the syllable. For certain vowel environments, tongue and other articulator anticipatory gestures were found to be linguistically significant since listeners were able to correctly label the vowel when presented with only the schwa segment of the syllable.

From the standpoint of connected speech recognition, experiments were performed to investigate the perceptual nature of CV-syllables removed from Japanese connected speech. The recognition of individual vowels and syllables was found to be seriously impaired when they were taken out of their phonetic environments and presented as monosyllables to listeners. The recognition, however, substantially improved as the speech segments were lengthened. Finally, it was found that a vowel and a CV-syllable were completely recognized when they were in the middle position of a speech unit consisting of three successive CV-syllables. The results indicate that at least two syllables, one preceding and one following, are necessary to provide an acoustic environment for the correct identification of a CV-syllable.

Forty college student volunteers, equally divided by sex, participated in a study of vocal hesitations and kinesic hesitation phenomena in an anxiety-producing interview conducted by male and female interviewers. The vocal hesitations were of Mahl's non-ah type and included sentence change, repetition, stutter, omission, sentence incompletion, tongue slip, and intruding incoherent sounds. The kinesic hesitation phenomena included head, hand, arm, leg, and foot movement, posture change, and body shift.

The results showed a close relationship between the occurrences of vocal hesitations and movement. Additionally, they showed clear differences in the frequency of occurrence of the kinds of vocal hesitations and movements. Finally, it was found that the most common location of a kinesic phenomenon is just before or simultaneously with a nonfluency rather than after one. The findings lend support to the idea that vocal and nonvocal behaviors may not always be so interdependent as parallel.

The acoustical spectrum of the Spanish vowels /i, a, u/ and their English counterparts were analyzed and compared. The English speakers were asked to produce the /i, a, u/ vowel sounds as in the words heed, father, food but in isolation, while the Spanish speakers produced the vowel sounds as in si, paso, tu. Statistical analysis showed no significant difference for the vowels /i, a/ between languages. For the vowel /u/, there was a statistically significant difference. These observations indicate that on the average both vowel systems (for /i, a/) are produced with similar peak frequencies in the acoustic spectrum. The spectrographic analysis of vowel /u/ does not point toward acoustical equivalency.