Mind Explorer 1 | Page 26

Speech production is the process by which spoken words are selected to be produced, have their phonetics formulated and then finally is articulated by the motor system in the vocal apparatus. Speech production can be spontaneous such as when a person creates the words of a conversation, reaction such as when they name a picture or read aloud a written word, or a vocal imitation such as in speech repetition.

Speech production is not the same as language production since language can also be produced manually by signs.

In ordinary fluent conversation people pronounce each second roughly four syllables, ten or twelve phonemes and two to three words out of a vocabulary that can contain 10 to 100 thousand words. Errors in speech production are relatively rare occurring at a rate of about once in every 900 words in spontaneous speech. Words that are commonly spoken or learned early in life or easily imagined are quicker to say than ones that are rarely said, learnt later in life or abstract.

By Karla Malespin

English Major

UPNFM- Honduras

The art of speech production:

Articulation

26 Mind Explorer/ October, 2013