Abstract
The chapter builds the foundation for understanding how our bodies create speech. The discussion is framed around three main processes related to speaking: breathing, voicing and articulation. The discovery activities and commentaries bring awareness of multiple communicative functions produced by coordinated actions of various organs participating in speaking. Benus closes the chapter by comparing the vocal tracts of humans and chimpanzees and presenting the hypotheses of Philip Lieberman that the human speech apparatus evolved adaptively favouring the communicative function over the more basic ones linked to survival.
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Notes
- 1.
But interested readers can find many great illustrations of the anatomy of the tongue in the internet, for example here https://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/journey/tongue.html.
- 2.
Many authors refer to this part of the tongue as the ‘front’. However, this is not very intuitive and thus the term ‘body’ will be used in this book.
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Beňuš, Š. (2021). Articulatory Mechanisms in Speech Production. In: Investigating Spoken English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54349-5_3
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