Monday May 05, 2003
Streaming Words
Listen.
Listen to someone talking. There is more going on that meets the ear. When you hear the words being spoken, it seems there are pauses between the words. These “pauses” or gaps allow us to identify each audible word in the same way that we read text: there are spaces between words in a sentence.
Despite what we think we hear, there are no specific pauses between words in everyday speech. The words we hear are an interconnected stream of words and phrases being hosed into our ears. So, how do we make sense of one another’s speech? The marvelous processing power of the brain interprets this stream into a coherent form that we can understand, and it seems to us that there are pauses between words.
Prove this phenomenon to your self. If you listen to computer-generated speech, you can hear the mechanical pauses as the machine attempts to segregate one word from another. And that’s why computer-speech sounds artificial.
