Language is Magic
Virtual Triton Day 2020 - Will Styler
My goal today is to convince you that speech is magic
There are many elements of language
They're all magic
Not all languages are spoken
... but we're going to focus on speech
The Plan
Talking is impossibly hard
Understanding speech is impossibly hard
Speech Production is impossibly hard
Speech is flapping bits of meat around in your head and throat while you expel air.
- Let's look a little closer at the details
We break the types of meat-flapping into two categories
"Consonants"
"Vowels"
Consonants
Producing obstructions in the mouth and throat in very specific patterns and places
We describe consonants by thinking about three things...
- Voicing
- Manner
- Place
Voicing
Is our larynx buzzing or not?
Voicing
Is our larynx buzzing or not?
Voicing, Continued
- Sad, Zap, Dad, Pop, Dash, Garage
Manner
What exactly are your tongue and other articulators doing?
Tad, Sad, Mad, Lad
Place
- Where's your tongue in the mouth while doing that?
Place, Continued
Pin, Tin, Kin
Fin, Sin, Shin
Now let's think about sounds we already make...
/g/ as in "go"
/v/ as in "Victor"
/n/ as in "nice"
/w/ as in "weird"
/r/ as in "rip"
Yes, there are two completely different ways to make the English "R"
- Technically, there are around 13...
What about vowels?
Vowels are different.
You hold your tongue in a certain position to create a certain resonance
Let's try it!
This means there are infinitely many possible vowels
- ... and every vowel you make is probably a bit different.
Our vowel system is hardcore
Arabic has three vowels (/i, a, u/)
A majority of languages have five (/i, e, a, o, u/)
My dialect of English has 16.
English vowels
/ i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ə, ʌ, ɑ, ɔ, ʊ, u /
/aj, oj, ej, ow, aw/
Few languages have us beat in terms of number of vowels
- (Rub it in, Danish)
Speech is a series of vowels and consonants
- So when you put all of this fancy articulation together...
So, making speech is amazingly complex
- ... and you don't care
Luckily, understanding speech is easy, right?
- Right?!?
Wrong.
Speech Perception is magic, too
Speech is flapping bits of meat around in your head and throat while you expel air.
- Speech perception is turning the resulting vibrations in the air back into language
So, what do these vibrations look like?
How do humans pick them up?
"Oh, he's talking about that thing up there!"
"Wait. You can't do that. You skipped a step. Go back."
- That step takes 2 years of grad school to understand how little we understand.
We are weirdly good at hearing speech
Vowels are very gradient
There are many possible gestures to make a vowel
There are many positions between the tongue position for 'date' and 'debt'
So, we should feel a very smooth progression between them?
Right?
Date vs. Debt
Date
Debt
?
??
???
Let's do an experiment!
????
Categorical Perception
- We use our knowledge of the categories to make strong decisions about which sounds are which
- Even when it's completely gradient!
We are really good at hearing human speech
Let's listen to some sounds
Let's listen to some sounds
Now let's play all three at once!
Let's listen to some sounds
Now let's play all three at once!
Does this help?
Sine Wave Speech
Recodes complex speech signals as the sum of three moving sine waves
Sine Wave Speech demonstrates how good we are at recovering speech in the world
So, Speech perception?
"The Large Hadron Collider is the most complex endeavor humans have ever undertaken."
Speech is the most complex endeavor humans have ever undertaken.
- ... and speech is just a small part of the complexity of human language
In Summary...
Language is Magic
- ... and that makes you all wizards
Questions? wstyler@ucsd.edu
