A Brief Critical Review of “The Speech Chain”

A Brief Critical Review of “The Speech Chain”

The book I am reading this semester this semester is “The Speech Chain” by Peter Denes and Elliot Pinson and I found this book very interesting for some reasons. As I mentioned earlier, when we talk in everyday life or about speech we never think that what process are involved, just like we never pay attention on how we breath although we breath every five seconds. As the writers suggested, our conversations with other people are chains of four interrelated events. When we start talking, first of all we decide what we are going to talk about and which are to be said to convey a precise message. This event occurs in our brain and is known as the linguistic level. With the completion of the Linguistic Level, our brain sends message to our speech producing organs to produce speech sounds. This process of producing speech sound by the articulators is known as the Physiological Level of the speech chain. The next level of the speech chain is the acoustic level which describes about the physics of sound travelling from our mouth to the listener’s ear. When the sound waves gives pressure to the listeners’ ears, the hearing mechanisms are activated to understand the sound which we call Physiological Level which ends at Linguistic Level of the chain, where the brain of the listener works to understand the message send by the speaker.

I feel myself very informed after reading this book. This book is complete insight about what events are occurred while we produce speech sounds. It is very interesting to know what happens when we talk to people, how we produce sounds, how does the sounds produced by our speech mechanism travel from our mouth to the ears of the listeners and how the listener understands what we are talking about. The writers has done a great job by breaking the process of speech communication into sections and corresponding sub-sections, which, I believe, helps us for easy understanding of the core information. In addition to that, this book is written in very simple English language and with the illustration of relevant diagrams, which are definitely helpful for the people who speak English as second language. Moreover, this book could be the course book for the students who are beginners of in linguistic field. I found this book closely related with our course book while reading the linguistic level of the speech chain. The phonetics and morphology are exactly what we read in the course book. I believe this book could be a very valuable source of information even for those people who are not the student of language; it is worth being familiar with the levels that involve when we talk in our everyday life.