Speech Production

Speech production is the process by which spoken words are selected to be produced, have their phonetics formulated and then finally are 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.

Normally speech is created with pulmonary pressure provided by the lungs that generates sound by phonation in the glottis in the larynx that then is modified by the vocal tract into different vowels and consonants. However speech production can occur without the use of the lungs and glottis in alaryngeal speech by using the upper parts of the vocal trait. An example of such alaryngeal speech is Donald Duck talk.

The vocal production of speech can be associated with the production of synchronized hand gestures that act to enhance the comprehensibility of what is being said.