Speech
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For the process of speaking to a group of people, see Public speaking. For other uses,
see Speech (disambiguation).
Speech production visualized by Real-time MRI
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Speech is human vocal communication using language. Each language
uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its
words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are
the same word, e.g., "role" or "hotel"), and using those words in their semantic character
as words in the lexicon of a language according to the syntactic constraints
that govern lexical words' function in a sentence. In speaking, speakers perform many
different intentional speech acts, e.g., informing, declaring, asking, persuading,
directing, and can use enunciation, intonation, degrees of loudness, tempo, and other
non-representational or paralinguistic aspects of vocalization to convey meaning. In
their speech speakers also unintentionally communicate many aspects of their social
position such as sex, age, place of origin (through accent), physical states (alertness
and sleepiness, vigor or weakness, health or illness), psychic states (emotions or
moods), physico-psychic states (sobriety or drunkenness, normal consciousness
and trance states), education or experience, and the like.
Although people ordinarily use speech in dealing with other persons (or animals), when
people swear they do not always mean to communicate anything to anyone, and
sometimes in expressing urgent emotions or desires they use speech as a quasi-
magical cause, as when they encourage a player in a game to do or warn them not to
do something. There are also many situations in which people engage in solitary
speech. People talk to themselves sometimes in acts that are a development of what
some psychologists (e.g., Lev Vygotsky) have maintained is the use in thinking of silent
speech in an interior monologue to vivify and organize cognition, sometimes in the
momentary adoption of a dual persona as self addressing self as though addressing
another person. Solo speech can be used to memorize or to test one's memorization of
things, and in prayer or in meditation (e.g., the use of a mantra).
Researchers study many different aspects of speech: speech production and speech
perception of the sounds used in a language, speech repetition, speech errors, the
ability to map heard spoken words onto the vocalizations needed to recreate them,
which plays a key role in children's enlargement of their vocabulary, and what different
areas of the human brain, such as Broca's area and Wernicke's area, underlie speech.
Speech is the subject of study for linguistics, cognitive science, communication
studies, psychology, computer science, speech pathology, otolaryngology,
and acoustics. Speech compares with written language,[1] which may differ in its
vocabulary, syntax, and phonetics from the spoken language, a situation
called diglossia.
The evolutionary origins of speech are unknown and subject to much debate
and speculation. While animals also communicate using vocalizations, and
trained apes such as Washoe and Kanzi can use simple sign language, no animals'
vocalizations are articulated phonemically and syntactically, and do not constitute
speech.
