2011-04-12

April 12th, 2011 8:30pm

A speaker is under time pressure, typically choosing about three words per second out of a vocabulary of 40,000 or more, while at the same time producing perhaps five syllables and a dozen phonemes per second, using more than 100 finely-coordinated muscles, each of which has a maximum gestural repetition rate of about three cycles per second or less. Word choices are being made, and sentences constructed, at the same time that earlier parts of the same phrase are being spoken.