On time and timing in speech.
| Number | 175 |
|---|---|
| Year | 1974 |
| Drawer | 3 |
| Entry Date | 07/09/1998 |
| Authors | Lisker, L. |
| Contact | |
| Publication | Current Trends in Linguistics, 12, 2387-2418. |
| url | http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0175.pdf |
| Abstract | [Introduction] However the student of language chooses to regard the object of investigation, whether as an assemblage of sentences or indeterminate number or as a finite system of rules for sentence generation, he must at some point in specifying a language talkie about elements and their arrangements. And however complex the network of relations that fix the elements within the sentence, the arrangement of these elements is the simple one of serial ordering. In the case of sentences ‘actualized’ as pieces of speech this serial ordering is necessarily one of temporal sequence, the elements of which are phonetic segments or ‘speech sounds’, i.e. the lowest-level phonological units susceptible of physical description. This description is in general resolvable into a set of specifications with respect to a certain number of parameters, so that any two phonetic segments are comparable as points located within some multidimensional physical space. These parameters, whether they specify states of the speech-generating mechanisms, acoustic properties of the speech signal, or even the instructions to the speech apparatus, are usually chosen for their usefulness in accounting for listeners’ ability to decide consistently that some speech pieces are repetitions of a single sentence and that others are instances of different sentences. |
| Notes |
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