Knowra Spoken language Spoken language Spoken language is language produced through speech, using vocal sounds to communicate. It contrasts with written language and signed languages, which use different physical channels.
Speech production : The process by which the respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory systems produce speech sounds. It converts intended words into the sounds that make spoken language audible.
Phonology : The study of how a language organizes speech sounds into contrastive patterns. It explains why some sound differences distinguish words while others do not.
Origin of language : The emergence of language in human evolution, whose timing and pathway remain uncertain. Spoken language is likely older than writing, but its beginnings cannot be directly recorded.
Speech recognition : The computational task of converting spoken audio into linguistic representations, often text. It tests how well machines can identify words in variable speech.
Sign language : A natural language expressed through manual, facial, and bodily movements, with its own grammar. It communicates through a visual-manual channel rather than spoken sound.
Speech perception : The processes by which listeners interpret speech sounds as linguistic units and meaning. It explains how listeners recover words despite variation and noise.
Phoneme : A contrastive sound category that can distinguish words in a language. Phonemes are abstract units realized through variable spoken sounds.
Homo sapiens : The living species of human, characterized by complex cognition and communication. Spoken language developed within the evolutionary history of humans.
Text-to-speech synthesis : The computational generation of spoken audio from text or other linguistic representations. It runs the speech pathway in the opposite direction from ordinary listening.
Written language : Language represented by visual or tactile symbols, such as letters or braille. It can preserve language beyond the time and place of a spoken exchange.
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