Michael Miller

Psychology 115W

Joe Lappin

11-5-02

More than a Mouthful

While reading Pinker’s The Language Instinct, one might begin to make a lot of mouth movements and vocal noises to test all that is printed. I myself discovered quite a bit about how the mouth and the other speech organs work together to make sounds. While this in itself is a true discovery, the knowledge gained of the complexity of this system is priceless. As I sat in my desk chair making the a sound in sam and sat, I realized that the processes which we go through to create our verbal language is taken for granted everyday. Everyone just knows that they can speak and that others will be able to understand. It is a miracle that these sounds that we put together are able to make any sense whatsoever since they are simply a pattern created by our vocal system. Simple questions that children might ask popped repeatedly into my head, “why do we make a “tuh” sound for “t”” and “why don’t we speak Spanish people who roll their r’s?” These questions seem so simple and innocent, but they bear so much weight in the logic that surrounds our language. As Pinker put it, “there are no little spaces between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words”(159). That simple statement is mind boggling. The human mind has been trained differently for each different language to recognize when one word ends and the next begins. The complexity of understanding and production of the English language is only a small percentage of the complexities involved in languages such as Japanese and the click languages of South Africa. This reading has opened my mind to the broadness and elasticity of a spoken language that I have always taken for granted as relatively simple.