| Abstract | [Introduction]
This paper is an attempt to summarize what we now know, or rather don’t know, about a vaguely defined area called “the organization of speech.” In particular, the topic is what MacNeilage has called the “reality status of concepts of linguistic units” (MacNeilage, 1973).
The study of the organization of speech is the province of speech science, a rather uneasy blend of elements from phonetics and motor physiology. Perhaps I can illustrate the mixture with an anecdote quoted from Granit’s (1976) biography of the great neurophysiologist, Sherrington. He is recorded as saying to his student, Wilder Penfield, “It must be nice to hear the preparation speak to you.” Our hypotheses about speech organization came partly, then, from phonetics, and partly from general neurophysiology. I would like to run through four of these hypotheses, in their argument form, and discuss some evidence that has caused them to fail. |
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