"Speech production is the process by which thoughts are translated into speech."
The process by which we generate speech sounds using the articulators and vocal apparatus.
Articulators: These are the organs that work together to produce speech sounds. The main articulators are the lips, tongue, teeth, palate, and vocal cords.
Place of Articulation: This refers to where the articulators come together to produce a specific speech sound. There are different places of articulation such as bilabial (using both lips), alveolar (using the ridge behind the teeth), velar (using the back of the tongue and the soft palate), and so on.
Manner of Articulation: This refers to how the airflow is modified as it passes through the articulators. There are different manners of articulation such as stops (complete closure of airflow), fricatives (partial closure causing friction noise), and so on.
Voicing: This refers to whether or not the vocal cords are vibrating during speech production. There are voiced and voiceless sounds.
Phoneme: This is the smallest unit of sound in a language. For example, /p/ and /b/ are phonemes in English.
Coarticulation: This is the phenomenon where speech sounds influence each other based on their surrounding sounds. For example, the vowel sound in "cat" will be different if it is preceded by a "k" as in "kick.".
Prosody: This refers to the melody, stress, and rhythm of speech. Prosody conveys emotions and changes the meaning of a sentence.
Dialect: This refers to the variation in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar across different regions and social groups.
Speech disorders: These are conditions where speech production is affected, such as stuttering, lisping, and aphasia.
Phonetic transcription: This is the representation of speech sounds through symbols. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is commonly used.
Vowels: These are the sounds that are produced when the air passes through the vocal cords and the space between the tongue and the palate varies.
Consonants: These are sounds that are produced by obstructing the airflow through the vocal tract.
Diphthongs: These are vowel sounds that have two different configurations of the mouth, producing a sound that changes during the articulation.
Nasals: These are consonant sounds that are produced with the nasal cavity open, so that the air is allowed to pass through the nose.
Fricatives: These are consonant sounds that are produced by forcing the air through a narrow opening in the mouth, creating a turbulent sound.
Affricates: These are sounds that start as a stop consonant and then transition into a fricative sound.
Plosives: These sounds are produced by completely stopping the airflow and then releasing it suddenly.
Approximants: These are sounds that are produced when the articulators come close to each other, but don't create significant obstruction to the airflow.
Stop consonants: These are sounds that are produced with complete closure of the oral cavity, blocking the airflow entirely.
Lateral consonants: These are sounds that are produced by obstructing the airflow at the centre of the mouth and allowing it to escape through one or both sides of the tongue.
Trills: These are sounds that are produced by rapid reflex vibrations of the articulators.
Clicks: These are consonant sounds that are produced by sucking in or pulling the tongue back quickly after it touches the alveolar ridge or the velum.
Glottal consonants: These are sounds that are produced by the action of the glottis, which is the opening between the vocal folds.
"This includes the selection of words, the organization of relevant grammatical forms, and then the articulation of the resulting sounds by the motor system using the vocal apparatus."
"Speech production can be spontaneous, reactive, or imitative."
"Errors in speech production are relatively rare occurring at a rate of about once in every 900 words in spontaneous speech."
"Words that are commonly spoken or learned early in life or easily imagined are quicker to say than ones that are rarely said, learnt later in life, or are abstract."
"Speech production can occur without the use of the lungs and glottis in alaryngeal speech by using the upper parts of the vocal tract."
"The development of speech production throughout an individual's life starts from an infant's first babble and is transformed into fully developed speech by the age of five."
"The first stage of speech doesn't occur until around age one (holophrastic phase)."
"Between the ages of one and a half and two and a half the infant can produce short sentences (telegraphic phase)."
"After two and a half years, the infant develops systems of lemmas used in speech production."
"An adult now develops speech in four stages: Activation of lexical concepts, select lemmas needed, morphologically and phonologically encode speech, and the word is phonetically encoded."
"In ordinary fluent conversation people pronounce roughly four syllables, ten or twelve phonemes, and two to three words out of their vocabulary each second."
"Speech production is not the same as language production since language can also be produced manually by signs."
"Normally speech is created with pulmonary pressure provided by the lungs that generates sound by phonation through the glottis in the larynx that then is modified by the vocal tract into different vowels and consonants."
"The vocal production of speech may be associated with the production of hand gestures that act to enhance the comprehensibility of what is being said."
"An example of such alaryngeal speech is Donald Duck talk."
"Errors in speech production are relatively rare occurring at a rate of about once in every 900 words in spontaneous speech."
"[...] their vocabulary (that can contain 10 to 100 thousand words)."
"Around four or five, the child's lemmas are largely increased; this enhances the child's production of correct speech and they can now produce speech like an adult."
"[The vocal tract] modifies sound into different vowels and consonants."