Lessons About Speech / Le�ons de parole

We rarely question the mechanI'ms and processes that enable us to perform such feats as uttering as many as 200 words a minute (more than one word every 400 milliseconds, and to process messages containing identical sound characteristics.How do we prepare what we?re going to say? How do we fied the right word? How do we organise sound sequences to produce messages? How do we decipher the sound sequences we hear? How do we manage to decipher the meaning of sentences heard in difficult situations? Why do we make mistakes and slips of the tongue? What is the path taken by information through the auditory system and the brain? The field of psycholinguistics has progressed greatly in the past few years, and both Juan Segui and Luc Ferrand have contributed to it. They describe the many complex operations that make up the simple ? yet extraordinary ? act of speech.Juan Segui is a research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the director of the laboratory of experimental psychology at the University of Paris-V. Ludovic Ferrand is a researcher working in the laboratory of experimental psychology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.