Abstract
To the physiologist who would study language in terms of the interests represented at this symposium, the most obvious linguistic processes—the selection of words to convey meaning and the arrangement of words in sentences—must seem far removed from familiar concepts and methods. Surely, he would prefer to study processes that are physiologically more accessible, but are yet linguistic. We believe that the production and perception of speech, in the narrow sense, is one such process; we suggest, therefore, that the physiologist might do well to start there. The questions we would have him ask can be put very simply: How does a speaker convert the phonetic units—the consonants and vowels—to a stream of sound? On hearing that stream, how does a listener recover the phonetic units?
The preparation of this paper, and much of the research on which it is based, has been supported by grants and contracts from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Office of Naval Research, and the Veterans Administration. Earlier phases of our work were aided by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the National Science Foundation.
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Mattingly, I.G., Liberman, A.M. (1969). The Speech Code and the Physiology of Language. In: Leibovic, K.N. (eds) Information Processing in The Nervous System. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-87086-6_6
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