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In the 1960s, Peter Denes described the processes of speech production and perception as a “speech chain” connecting the speaker and the listener (Denes & Pinson, 1993). The links in the chain are at multiple levels: linguistic, physiological, and acoustic (see Figure 2.1). Before we utter anything, we must have something in mind to say. As we develop an idea, we use our linguistic capabilities to choose the necessary words or lexis from our mental dictionaries and to encode our message grammatically by formulating phrases and sentences. Physiology comes into play as the brain begins sending motor commands to the appropriate structures in the vocal tract, such as the vocal folds, tongue, and lips. Notice that the linguistic and physiological processes can overlap: the speaker may produce an utterance while still planning more speech. The activity of the vocal structures yields a complex acoustic signal that travels through the air to the listener's ears. There the decoding process occurs. First the listener's perceptual system converts the sound to neural signals—another physiological process—and then these are interpreted as words, phrases, and sentences, again on the basis of linguistic knowledge.

For the moment, we will focus on three major aspects of the physiological part of the sequence: initiating the airstream, PHONATION, and ARTICULATION.