Why when you are speaking, your first word is sometimes inaudible and just a lip movement?

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Why when you are speaking, your first word is sometimes inaudible and just a lip movement?

In: Biology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

When we speak English, individual words often aren’t clear, they blend together. Less important words are quieter, and more important words are louder and longer. So you might say, “Iwannavisit my DAD in AUSTRALIA budditso EXPENSIVE!” The “I” is important grammatically, but it’s not important for meaning in conversation- it’s obvious it’s you. In some languages the “I” would be omitted altogether, but in English it’s there, just not very pronounced.

So my guess is, if the word’s not very important, it can be almost inaudible.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Speaking is a pretty complex process. You push air through your voice box where your vocal cords vibrate it. How fast you push the air alters how loud the resulting sound is, and a combination of how fast your vocal cords vibrate and the shape of the space between them alters the pitch. Once past your voice box a complex arrangement of your throat muscles, tongue, cheeks and teeth alter the flow of the vibrating air to make words. The whole process needs to happen in the right order for things to be intelligible.

When what you describe happens its likely because one of the things that needs to happen didn’t in the right order. Maybe you got the air going and your lips moved, but your vocal cords didn’t start vibrating in time. Or maybe your vocal cords and lips were in sync, but there wasn’t enough air in your lungs to support the noise you were trying to make.