Co-articulation as Par t of Our Daily Life
Probably, the most important aspect of psycholinguistic aspect of production is the phenomenon of co-articulation. Co-articulation simply means that the articulators are always performing motions for more than just one speech sound at a time. The articulators do not perform all the work for one speech sound, then another, then another. The genius of speech production is that phonological segments overlap, so the articulators work at maximum efficiency, in order to be able to produce 10 to 15 phonetic segments per second, even more in rapid speech. This transmission speech would be impossible to achieve if each phonological unit were produced individually. As it is, speech is produced more slowly than necessary for the speech perception system. People can actually understand speech that has been sped up or compressed at several times the normal rate. But co-articulation is not just a matter of convenience for the speaker: if speech were not co-articulated, that is, if phonological units did not overlap speech would actually be too slow and disconnected for the hearer to process it efficiently.
By: Mauricio Flores
EnglishMajor
UPNFM
14 Mind Explorer/ October, 2013