SPEECH: IT'S NATURE

AND IMPORTANCE
Presented by: Group 2

ENG 106- SPEECH AND THEATER ARTS

 What is Speech?
INTRODUCTION
•Speech is communication through talking or a talk given to
an audience. To communicate freely with others, to be
listened to and understood; these are communication rights
for everyone.
•Each day we use communication, speech and language to
connect with people and the world around us. In fact,
communication is a basic right and every individual should
reach their full communicative potential in terms of speech
and language.
•Produced by the vocal organs. Every language has a definite set of
speech sounds, and every sound can be described with reference to
the vocal organ that is used to produce it.
 TEN IMPORTANT FACTS WHY WE NEED
TO STUDY SPEECH
1. The speech skill is a wonder. To produce a phrase, about 100
muscles of the chest, neck, jaw, tongue and lips must collaborate.
Each muscle is a bundle made of hundreds or thousands of fibers.
For the coordination of these muscles much more neurons than
necessary are required for contracting the muscles from an
2. Each spoken
athlete's feet. word or short phrase is accompanied by its own
pattern of muscular movements. All the information necessary for
speaking a phrase like "How are you?" is stored in the brain, in the
speech area. But it's not about a fixed program. If you have a
mouth wound impeding you to pronounce the words like you
usually do, the movements are modified, allowing you to utter the
3. A simple "Hello" can transmit a lot of things. The voice's
tone shows if the speaker is happy, pleased, bored, hurried,
angry, sad, scared, aggressive or dominant and the intensity
of these states; irony, affection, support or joke. The sense of
a simple expression can be changed according to the rapidity
of the movements and the fractions of seconds depending on
how much the movement of different muscles lasts.
4. Humans can emit about 14 seconds per second,
while isolated parts of the speech apparatus, like
tongue, lips, jaws and others cannot execute more
than 2 movements per second.
5. Early humans could have had a rudimentary
speech system of visual, tactile and auditive
calls, resembling animal communication.
Speech appeared when we acquired the ability
of representing objects through symbols and
communicate to another individual our own
mental creations. Our special brain enabled us
to do this.
6. Is speech born or acquired? Famous cases of children
lost in the jungle before the age of three (when speech is
largely acquired) and found several years later showed
they had limited ability to learn the human speech and
learning the speech requires early interaction with the
others. The brain seems to have a period when it
acquires speech and if this period is skipped over, the
individual won't gain later the speech skill. The speech
can develop only inside a community and at the age
when the brain is growing.
7. Complex human speech is linked to two brain nuclei in
the left cerebral cortex: one controlling articulation and
the other storing and integrating grammatical rules.
Speech initiation begins in Wernicke's area, which
communicates with Broca's area, responsible for
grammatical processing. Impulses then travel from these
areas to the muscles involved in speech production.
Wernicke's and Broca's areas connect with the visual and
auditory systems, enabling reading comprehension and
auditory processing, and contain a memory bank for
8. A sudden boost in the evolution of the speech was given by
the emergence of the language some 50,000 years ago.The
modern 6,000 languages are believed to have originated in a
sole mother language, as humans are believed to have formed
just a small population of about 1,000 individuals 50,000 years
ago. By now, three super-families of human languages exist.

9. Many ape individuals, of bonobo, chimps, gorillas or

orangutans have been taught human sign languages or to
manage graphic or computer symbols. Some can learn up to
1,000 words (up to 40 new words daily), but their temporal
consciousness is null. Thus, in the end, it is all about brain
capacities.
10. There are three major hypotheses about the way human
languages emerged:
I. The ingestion by the first humans of psilocybin, a
psychoactive alkaloid encountered in some mushrooms
could have turned on newly evolved brain parts, like the
Broca's area (linked to articulated speech) from the cortex.
Neolithic wall paintings found at Tassili-n-Ajjer (Sahara)
represent a shaman with the hands full of mushrooms, a
fact that corroborates this theory.

II. The "evolutionist argument" speaks about brain

innovations, mechanisms that induced a clear advantage.
10. There are three major hypotheses about the way human
languages emerged:

III. A sole mutation could have triggered the speech

ability. The human languages have a common structure
which could be considered innate and characteristic to
the species. In 2001, American researchers discovered on
the chromosome 7 a gene whose lack amongst the
members of a family produced severe difficulties for
building phrases and understanding them, even if those
persons were really intelligent. This shows that language
is not connected to overall intelligence and also the fact
 CREDO
by E. Christian Buckner

CREDO
by E.
Christian
Buckner
 SPEECH ORGANS AND THEIR FUNCTION:
Speech Organs that belong to Articulatory
system:
•Lips •TEETH:
Lips include upper lip and lower The small whitish structures
lip. They serve for creating found in jaws in front of
different sounds - mainly the mouth, immediately after
labial, bilabial e.g. /p/, /b/, /m/, lips are teeth. They are
and /w/, labio-dental consonant responsible for creating
sounds e. g. /f/ and /v/rounded to sounds mainly the labio-
produce the lip-shape for vowels dental (tongue touching the
like /u/ and thus create an
front teeth) e.g. /f/and
important part of the speech
/v/and lingua-dental e.g.
SPEECH ORGANS AND THEIR FUNCTION:
•ALVEOLAR RIDGE: •HARD PALATE:
Alveolar ridge is basically hard ridge behind Hard palate is a thin horizontal
the upper front teeth. It is between the roof
bony plate of the skull, located
of the mouth and the upper teeth. You can
feel its shape with your tongue. Its surface
in the roof of the mouth. It is
is really much rougher than it feels, and is often called the "roof of the
covered with little ridges. For the sound /s/, mouth". Its smooth curved
air from the lungs passes continuously surface can felt with the
through the mouth, but the tongue is raised tongue. The interaction
sufficiently close to the alveolar ridge to
between the tongue and the
cause friction as it partially blocks the air
that passes. Moreover, sounds made with
hard palate is essential in the
the tongue touching here (such as t and d) formation of certain speech
are called alveolar. sounds, notably /t/, /d/, and /j/.
 SPEECH ORGANS AND THEIR FUNCTION:
•VELUM (SOFT PALATE):
The velum or soft palate is in a position that allows air to pass
through the nose and through the mouth. Often in speech it is
raised so that air cannot escape through the nose. Its mains
function is to separate the nasal cavity from oral cavity in order
to produce the oral speech sounds. If this separation is
incomplete, air escapes through the nose during speech and the
speech is perceived as hyper nasal. The other important thing
about the velum is that it is one of the articulators that can be
touched by the tongue. When we make the sounds k and g the
tongue is in contact with the lower side of the velum, and we call
 SPEECH ORGANS AND THEIR FUNCTION:

•UVULA:
The hanging ball's full name is the “palatine uvula,”
referring to its location on your soft palate. It
functions in tandem with the back of the throat, the
palate, and air coming up from the lungs to create
a number of guttural and other sounds. In many
languages, it closes to prevent air escaping through
the nose when making some sounds.
 SPEECH ORGANS AND THEIR FUNCTION:
GLOTTIS:
The combination of vocal folds and space in between the folds is
known as glottis. As the vocal folds vibrate, the resulting vibration
produces a “buzzing” quality to the speech called voice or voicing
or pronunciation. Sound production involving only the glottis is
called glottal. Example is the sound /h/. The vibration produced is
an essential component of voiced consonants as well as vowels. If
the vocal folds are drawn apart, air flows between them causing
no vibration, as in the production of voiceless consonants.
Voiced consonants include /v/, /z/, /ʒ/, /d͡ʒ/, /ð/, /b/, /d/, /ɡ/, /w/.
Voiceless consonants include /f/, /s/, /ʃ/, /t͡ʃ/, /θ/, /p/, /t/, /k/, /ʍ/, and
/h/.
SPEECH ORGANS AND THEIR FUNCTION:

TONGUE:
The tongue is a very important articulator and
it can be moved into many different places and
different shapes. Its movement in oral cavity
plays important part in production of almost
every speech sound. Usually, it is divided into
different parts: tip, blade, front, back and root.
SPEECH
ORGANS
 MAJOR PARTS OF THE BODY FOR
PRODUCTION
The Lungs: OF SPEECH SOUNDS:
The function of all of the mentioned body parts is to
produce Speech sounds and speech requires some sort of
air source. We produce a majority of speech sounds by
forcing air upwards from the lungs, an action that is used
in normal breathing. But it is necessary that in order to
produce a speech, sound the outward moving airstream
must be modified by manipulation of the larynx and
articulators in the oral and nasal cavities. The ways in
which the airstream is modified is the focus on this
The larynx ("voice box"):
The larynx, more commonly known as the voice box or
the Adam's apple, is crucial in the production and
differentiation of speech sounds. The larynx is located at
exactly the point where the throat divides between the
trachea (the windpipe), which leads to the lungs, and the
esophagus (the tube that carries food or drink to the
stomach).
Over the larynx is a flap called the epiglottis that closes
off the trachea when we swallow. When the epiglottis is
folded back out of the way, the parts of the larynx that
The Vocal Folds:
There are two thin sheets of tissue that stretch in a V-
shaped fashion from the front to the back of the larynx.
These are called the vocal folds. (You'll often hear vocal
"cords," which is doesn't accurately convey the way the
muscle works.) The space between the vocal folds is known
as the glottis. The vocal folds can be positioned in different
Air
wayspasses through
to create the vocal
speech folds. If the vocal folds
sounds.
are open and air passes unobstructed, the vocal
folds do not vibrate. Sounds produced this way are
called voiceless. But if the vocal folds are held
together and tense and air doesn't pass
unobstructed, the sounds produced this way are call
Nasal Cavity:
In oral sounds most air is expelled via the
oral cavity (mouth). Typically, the velum is
raised at the back of the mouth to block
the passage of air into the nasal cavity.
In nasal sounds, on the other hand, the velum is
lowered, to allow airflow through the nasal cavity.
In English, nasal consonants are accompanied by
the blocking of airflow through the oral cavity.
Notice that the movements of your tongue and lips
are identical in the (a) and (b) examples of (1-3).
The only difference is that the velum is raised in
the (a) examples and lowered in the (b) examples.
THANK YOU!