1.6 The Miracle of Speech

Lili said her first word when she was 15 months old, and started to form simple two-and-three-word phrases before she turned two. A few years later, she began school, where her teachers taught her how to read and write, a visually dominated process that would go on for many years: showing her how to read and write letters, how to formulate those letters into written words with spaces in between, and how to punctuate those word strings into sentences and paragraphs. The thing is, this process was just a visual representation of something Lili had already been doing for years. She learned to speak without the help of those visual tools, and could always speak more quickly than she could write.

Take a moment to consider how that came to be:

• Around 4 months old, Lili discovered that her mouth was capable of making lots of fun noises. Those sounds were produced by organs that were almost all designed for another primary purpose — lungs for breathing, lips for sealing and opening her mouth, teeth (which hadn’t come in yet) for chewing solid food, and tongue for transporting food back to her throat. Before she could be taught any of this, Lili subconsciously figured out that all those body parts could also be recruited for the “side job” of making vocal sounds. Add to that mix the one body part that does not have a “day job”: the vocal cords (also known as “vocal folds”), which Lili used to make a satisfying humming sound. Whenever Lili indulged in her new hobby of making noises with all those body parts, the adults in the vicinity responded enthusiastically. For instance, one day Lili put her lips together at the same time she made a humming sound (“mmm”) and then opened her lips (“aaa”) and then closed them again (“mmm”) and then opened them again (“aaa”), and her mother got terribly excited and shouted “My daughter just called me Mama!”
• Over the next few months, the people around Lili spent a lot of time making vocal sounds to her, and somehow Lili learned to imitate those sounds, without any conscious realization of how she could translate a sound that she heard into a particular combination of lip, tongue, teeth, and vocal cord movements she could make. Some of the sounds that Lili made didn’t happen to belong to the set of sounds in the language of the people around her, so she stopped making those noises. Sometimes the adults made a big point of saying a single word with a nice clean silent pause before and after the word, and repeated it several times until Lili could say it back. But most of the time, the adults just talked in a long string of continuous noise, such as “Youresuchabeautifulbabyarentyou,” and Lili’s young brain somehow learned to separate out different words. Lili’s father spent a lot of time teaching her specific words like body parts, but he never took the time to explain incredibly complex words like “of” and “for” and “as” and “with” and “than.” By the time she reached 18 months, Lili was learning eight new words a day, every day.^[1]

Fast forward a decade and a half, and Lili is a fast-talking teenager who, when she gets excited, speaks at a rate over 240 words per minute (four words per second). She is not conscious of the fact that some of those words contain a dozen or more phonemes (distinct speech sounds), especially when the spelling of that word fails to represent all the nuances of pronunciation. One day her mother is driving her to school and Lili spots a classmate she wants to avoid, and blurts out the phrase “Don’t stop.” What has Lili just done? She has:

• Made the “d” sound by placing her tongue against the roof of her mouth, toward the front, while making her vocal cords hum, and then quickly dropping her tongue down. If you asked Lili where she placed her tongue when she made that sound, she wouldn’t have the slightest idea.
• Made her mouth into a hollow channel to produce the vowel “o.”
• Closed her lips partway to make another vowel, “uw” (without even realizing that the “o” in “don’t” is two different vowel sounds in a row, called a diphthong).
• With her vocal cords still humming, put her tongue back against the roof of their mouth, but a little further back than for the “d,” in order to make the “n” sound.
• Stopped her vocal cords humming at precisely the right time, which she thought of as making the “t” sound, but really she was just stopping vocalizing altogether (which is known as a “glottal stop”).
• Dropped her tongue down far enough to make a hissing sound, “s” (being careful to not start her vocal cords humming just yet, so she didn’t make the equivalent “z” sound).
• Lifted her tongue up up to the roof of her mouth again to make the “t” sound, this time releasing a little puff of air (so it’s a different “t” sound than the previous one, even though she thinks they are the same sound since they are spelled using the same letter).
• Done two things at exactly the same time: lowered her tongue to just the right position to make the “o” vowel, while making her vocal cords start humming again (making a vowel sound which she thinks is the same as the vowel sound in “don’t” because of spelling, but it isn’t).
• Again done two things at precisely the same time: put her lips together, and stopped the vocal cords from humming (if she didn’t, she would make the “b” sound instead of the “p” sound).

She performs all nine of those steps flawlessly, in the space of less than half a second. She also does it with a Chicago accent, which means she makes all those sounds in a manner so similar to everyone around her that an expert could pinpoint where she lived within a few hundred miles. She grew up in Atlanta, where they pronounce their vowels and consonants differently (holding her tongue or lips a millimeter away from where she used to), speak at a different rate, and hold the length of the sounds a microsecond longer or shorter, but Lili abandoned her Georgia accent and picked up a Midwestern accent instead to fit in with her social group.

Meanwhile, her mother, who was just about to put her foot on the brake, immediately lifts her foot because she heard and correctly interpreted her daughter saying “Don’t stop.” What has just happened? The sound waves that Lili produced traveled through the air inside the car and reached her mother’s ears. Her mother, of course, had no direct knowledge of exactly what Lili just did with her tongue and lips and vocal cords, and wasn’t watching Lili’s face, so it just became a pattern of sound waves at specific frequencies. But based on those frequencies alone, Lili’s mother can distinguish between a “d” and a “t” and an “s” and an “f” sound, and knows exactly what Lili meant.

Lili goes on to say “That’s Amanda, who sits behind me in Geography class, and says she wants to be my friend, but she’s so bossy and full of herself, and she tried to steal Jodi’s boyfriend, and I just don’t want to deal with all that.” What’s noteworthy about this 42-word sentence, as with most sentences that Lili and everyone around her says, is that it has never been uttered before in the history of humankind, and never will be again. Lili was able to draw on her vocabulary (which at this point is around 10,000 words), formulate the words into a grammatically correct sentence following all the rules of verb tense and inflection and word order, and say it in an emotionally expressive way — in less than 10 seconds. It is also worth noting that while one part of her brain is concentrating on this monumental feat, another part is just making sure that her lungs are taking in and expelling the right amount of air.

Yes, Lili sometimes makes mistakes, mispronouncing or mishearing a word, or making a slight grammatical error, but most of the time her speech is error-free and fluent…and effortless. It’s a good thing it’s so effortless, because she sometimes keeps it up for hours on end. On this particular day, she uttered 23,719 words without making a single mistake.