Abby Cohn

There is an age-old paradox in that human speech is at once discrete and continuous. There is strong evidence that speech is manipulated in "segment" sized units and it is also organized hierarchically into higher units. Yet the physical events, the acoustic wave forms resulting from speech production and in turn perceived by the ear, are continuous. Discuss the nature of the relationship between the discrete and the continuous aspects of sound. How do the cognitive aspects--that is, phonology, the linguistic knowledge in the domain of sounds--relate to the phonetics, that is, the physical signal?