语言间隙

Scientists show how the brain slices speech up into recognizable words SPEECH SOUNDS LIKE it is made of words, but that impression has more to do with what’s in our heads than with what comes out of our mouths. In natu- ral speech, there are no clear acoustic boundaries separating words; we pause about as many times within words as we do between them. This is especially evi- dent when listening to an unfamiliar language being spoken: words often seem to “blur” together into one smeared stream of sound. So how does the brain slice speech into recognizable chunks? …