Speech and Language Sciences
Alexis D’Epagnier
Northern Arizona University
PANCAKE
/pænkek/
Communication is key part of living. Without communication, humans would not be able to function in the organized fashion as we do today. We communicate through writing, speaking and body language. Communication is how we express what we need, what we want and how we feel. It is the way information is passed from one person to the other and how people are able to react to that information. What is spoken and received between individuals is how verbal communication works. What we say and how we hear what is said to us is the balance between communications of individuals. It is a process that goes from linguistic, physiological to acoustic and back again. Language is a huge portion of communication and without it humans would not be able to understand one another. We break down our language into words and those words are broken down into sounds. For this paper’s purposes, we will break down the word “pancake” in the process of how it is spoken and how it is received. According to the International Phonetic Alphabet, the word “pancake” is transcribed as /pænkek/. The way the speaker speaks this word will be described first then the listener will be described. When we talk, it does not seem like there is much thought or effort to say what we have to say. In reality, what we say and how we say it is broken down into many different levels. For this paper’s purposes we will focus on one word as it is a lot to even describe just one word’s process. Speaking the word “pancake” is broken down into three different levels. The psycholinguistic level which involves the levels of expressive processing and the cortical centers for symbolic expression. The next level is the physiological level, which is broken into four categories of motor speech neurological