[From: Bruce Nevin (Thu 920418 13:57:59)]
There was a query in the linguist digest a while ago about voice
quality. She was talking with a voice teacher about why college
instructors are such poor speakers.
He said . . . 'The main problem is that they speak down here
[indicating the ventral pharyngeal wall] rather than in the front
of their mouths'. . . . Can
anyone interpret this expression? More generally, is there any
source which interprets in phonetic terms the weird but apparently
effective instructions of speech and singing teachers, such as 'sing
with your forehead'?
All of this refers to a perceived focus of resonance. I think Liberman
and Blumstein talk about it a bit. A "covered" tone or "chest" tone
seems to have higher frequencies damped, and so is less "penetrating".
A "covered" tone seems to me to be produced by expansion of the pharynx
("yawning"). A "head" tone seems to be a resonance through the sinus
cavities that may be helped or initiated by something like
pharyngealization. (It feels something like nasalization, but visual
inspection in a mirror suggests only contraction of the pharynx is
involved.) Differences of vowel quality may be involved.
This fits with my understanding that acoustic feedback is more
important than kinesthetic or tactile feedback for control of language.
This is not language per se, of course, but it is closely related.
People who can control these distinctions can't tell you how they do it
(the articulatory actions), they can only describe the result. Sound
familiar? And the result is described in subjective terms: how one's
voice sounds from inside one's own head, which is different of course
from how the teacher's voice sounds to the student in a demonstration.
Bill, I think your suggestion of providing alternative means for
controlling an audible distinction, as part of the first step of
learning the distinction, is an excellent and important one. It might
apply to a wide range of learning situations where characteristics of
automatized action (timing, sequence, etc) already established for
different but analogous categories might foreclose the learning
process--in effect imposing the established but now inappropriate
categorization by the back door of its automatized behavioral outputs!
Just in passing, Bill, I think you will be intrigued by what Lieberman
has to say in _The Biology and Evolution of Language_, particularly in
his chapter 3, Automatization and Syntax. This has been on my stack for
some time to get back to. He suggests in that chapter for example that
structures for motor control were adapted for syntax. It is interesting
that lesions in Wernicke's area result in problems with speech
perception and semantics (various types of Wernicke's aphasia) and those
in Broca's area result in problems with articulation and with the issues
of "grammar" (i.e. reductions) and interruptions (as for relative
clause) that Genie could not manage. Wernicke's area is an auditory
association region connected with the auditory system (Heschel's gyrus);
Broca's area is an "association" region similarly adjacent to the motor
control area of the brain (ibid. 25-29, 47). He has some interesting
discussion of hydrocephaly evidence against received wisdom that the
cortex is the essential and primary neural seat of intelligence, e.g.
discussion of the following quotation:
There's a young student at [Sheffield University, England] who has
an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics,
and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no
brain. We did a brain scan on him; we saw that instead of the
normal 4.5 centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the
ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of
mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly
with crebrospinal fluid. (J. Lorber, Is your brain really
necessary? Research news. _Science_ 210:1232-1234, quote from
p. 1232)
Bruce
bn@bbn.com