Our Changing World events, 2019 - How speech is optimised for efficient communication

24th Sept: Alice Turk, Professor of Linguistic Phonetics

(School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences)

Speech and its derivative, writing, play a crucial role in virtually all collective human endeavor, and arguably speech is our most highly developed and intricate skill. Alice Turk, Professor of Linguistic Phonetics at the University of Edinburgh, will discuss specific ways that speech is optimised for efficient communication: 1) speech production borrows anatomical structures and mechanisms from breathing and feeding, 2) each speech sound that these structures produce simultaneously signals multiple types of information: lexical, structural, social, indexical, and emotional, and 3) utterances are produced to be maximally intelligible with minimum time and effort