intent

[dan everett]

>It is indeed a good question whether we can as adults still have access to
>the individual subroutines that make up speech gestures.  There seems to be
>some variability here, speaking only anecdotally.  Most phonetics students
>can easily make an alveolar closing gesture on command, but independent
>control of (say) the velum, or vocal cord vibration seems less open to
>conscious inspection, at least for relatively untrained speakers.

>Geoff Nathan

A, perhaps apocryphal, story about Ken Pike's writing of his classic, PHONETICS
(not the Phonemics text) was that he was in the hospital for a broken leg (in
Mexico) and decided to 'do something useful'. So he thought carefully about the
way he produced sounds and wrote the book. Of course, he had had extensive
training in phonetics, but he did in fact construct most of the book thinking
his way through his own production of sounds.

Dan Everett