How speech works
Whenever we speak to each other, we take part in a paradoxical process. On the one hand, speech comes more naturally to us than almost anything else we do. There are times when we take extra care about the way we talk, but the talking itself, the simple act of exchanging information in real time, is as easy as breathing. On the other hand, this act is not really simple at all. In fact, it involves five different steps, though you may not be aware of any of them!
To illustrate these steps, we’ll start from the perspective of the listener, whose task is to make sense of what’s just been said. His work begins when sounds hit his ears. The ears translate the sounds into electric impulses that can be understood by the brain. Nerves carry these impulses to the brain, which then begins the work of understanding them.
The first step is to catch which sounds have just been heard. From the stream of incoming speech, the brain must pick out a series of identifiable
Once recognized, the series of phonemes must then be segmented into
Even after clumping the phonemes into meaningful morphemes, the brain still has to make sense of the way they’re arranged. Picking out dog and bark is a good start, but these content morphemes are not enough to understand the situation fully. The function morphemes the, -s, are, and -ing, though not very important by themeselves, paint a more complete picture by explaining which dog is barking, how many dogs are barking, when they’re barking, and how complete the barking is. When all the content and function morphemes are found to be in the proper arrangement, or
The only thing left is to decode the message. If the listener’s brain has a good grasp on the grammar of the language, it will be able to peel back the syntax and get at the
What happens in the other direction, from speaker to listener? First, the speaker must have something to relate (semantics). To get that candy in a form the listener can digest, he has to wrap it in a sentence (syntax), which he has to weave from words (lexicon) whose components (morphemes) must be articulated with sounds (phones) that the listener can be trusted to recognize (phonemes).
Exhausted yet? As you can see, the simple act of speech is anything but! Yet we perform it hundreds, sometimes thousands, of times a day. Most of the time we do it so easily that we don’t even notice. And for most purposes, that’s fine. Being a good driver is not the same thing as being able to open the hood of a car and explain everything going on in there.
Why bother?
So why would anyone want to open the hood? Why not leave that to the mechanics and just do your thing behind the wheel, where you feel comfortable? An experienced driver can operate a car without much thought, and a native speaker of a language can use that language without any thought at all. Notwithstanding, there are two situations when it’s helpful to learn more about the inner workings of language.
The first is learning a language non-natively. If you’re a bilingual who has spoken both the dominant language of your country and the language of your immigrant parents since you were a child, this doesn’t apply to you. (Count yourself lucky!) But if you’ve ever started learning a language from scratch, say in high school or college, you know how enormously difficult it can be. The reason is that none of the steps above, which are all automated in the language(s) you learned as a child, are automated in your target language. You have to learn a whole new set of phonemes (which will compete with your native language’s phonemes), build a working-size lexicon from the ground up, learn the structures that govern how words are combined (these can be very different from the ones in your native language), and practice those structures until you can design them fast enough for real-time conversation. No wonder so many language-learners give up long before becoming fluent! Armed with an understanding of how language works, learning a new one is a herculean endeavor. Without this understanding, it’s impossible.
The other situation that this understanding helps is improving your communication in your native language. Sooner or later, you’re bound to want to do this. A native language is a free gift we all get from our parents, genes, and amazing brains, but this gift has limits. First, it includes only the words and patterns we need for basic interactions – not the ones we’ll need to navigate complex ideas, specialized careers, and vibrant social relationships as high-functioning adults. Second, the language of power, the one everyone would profit most by using effectively, is not the language that everyone learns natively. Though no one gets all of it as part of the free gift of childhood, some get more of it than others. Even within the scope of a single language, certain words and patterns (like those of the Standard American English spoken in New England) are considered more prestigious than others (like the -in’s of American Southern English or the unconjuagated bes of Black English Vernacular, spoken across the United States). The ones you use are directly tied to your chances of success in many fields. This isn’t fair, but it is the reality.
It is important to realize that even if you’re a native speaker of English (and what a privilege that is!), the version of English that you got as your free gift in childhood may be very different from the prestige version. This is true if you grew up in a region known for dialect English, such as the South, but especially true if you grew up with immigrant parents who spoke only or primarily their native language at home. Your parents are not the only source of your native language, but they’re the earliest and one of the most influential. Your classmates at school are another source of your native language, as are the books and other materials you grew up reading. Your teachers can also influence your native-language ability, but only so far as you let them. These are the limits of your ability: your parents, your friends, your entertainments, and your study.
So if you speak English natively and are curious about how your ability stacks up to other native English speakers’, these are the questions you should be asking: “How good is my parents’ English? How good is my friends’ English? How properly do they speak? How often do I read? Are the books, magazines, and websites I read examples of proper English? How much effort have I made to learn grammar at school?” If your answer to these is “not very,” you can’t expect to score well on the language sections of a standardized test, which measures your Standard American English, with your current ability. Remember that you’ll be competing with monolingual speakers of SAE, who can’t speak your other native language but have grown up bathed in the very language that the tests measure.
The bad news is that you won’t get any extra points on SAE tests for speaking another language – impressive though that is. The good news is that you can improve your SAE ability, just as a monolingual English speaker could improve his ability in your other native language. The catch is that it won’t be nearly as easy as learning your first two languages was. You will have to learn grammar not as a naturally acquired collection of unrelated phrase structures, but as a system of universal rules; this is something you’ve probably never done before (’cause when have you had to?). You’ll also have to learn a huge number of words, most of which you’ve never used or even heard of before (’cause when would you have?).
This website exists to make your journey as easy as it can be. Though the sheer volume of things to learn can seem daunting, it becomes much more manageable when you realize how much sense it all makes. The pieces really do all fit together, like bricks in a wall. You’ve just never been shown – completely, anyway – how they fit together. Walk with me, and I’ll show you.
