Speech
lastmod 2026-05-28created 2026-05-282 edits
Speech is the use of the human voice as a medium for language. Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning such as words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts, such as informing, declaring, asking, persuading, and directing, and speech can vary in various aspects such as articulation, intonation, loudness, and tempo to convey meaning. Individuals may also unintentionally communicate aspects of their social position through speech, such as sex, age, place of origin, physiological and mental condition, education, and experiences.
While normally used to facilitate communication with others, people may also use speech without the intent to communicate. Nevertheless, speech may express emotions or desires. People sometimes talk to themselves, which is a development of what some psychologists (e.g., Lev Vygotsky) have maintained is the use of silent speech in an interior monologue to vivify and organize cognition, sometimes in the momentary adoption of a dual persona, talking to oneself as though addressing another person. Talking to oneself can be used for memorization or to test one's memorization, and in prayer or meditation.
Researchers study many different aspects of speech: speech production and speech perception of the sounds used in a language, speech repetition, speech errors, the ability to map heard spoken words onto the vocalizations needed to recreate them (which plays a key role in children's vocabulary expansion), and how different areas of the human human brain, such as Broca's area and Wernicke's area, underlie speech. Speech is the subject of study for linguistics, cognitive science, communication studies, psychology, computer science, speech pathology, otolaryngology, and acoustics. Speech is compared with written language, which may differ from spoken language in its vocabulary, syntax, and phonology, a situation called diglossia.
The evolutionary origin of speech is subject to debate and speculation. Animals also communicate using vocalizations, but although trained apes such as Washoe and Kanzi can use simple sign language, no animal's vocalizations are articulated phonemically and syntactically, and they do not constitute speech.
See also
- Presentation
- Korean: 피치덱 (Pitch Deck) - A presentation that startups use to introduce their business ideas to investors and raise funding.