The question always asked is: “You have these animations which show that for some ordinary function words, pronouns and conjunctions and so on, the sounds of them have associated movements which appear to be related to the meaning or use of the words. You also have asserted that for the names of animals somewhere in the sound structure of the name of the animal is something which appropriately used can lead one to produce a sound which is like the sound usually made by that animal”. [This is not the case for all animals of course; some names of animals appear to be visually descriptive though one has always to be careful, to be sure that, though a name may appear to be visually descriptive, there is not something which still conceals a sound made by the animal].

“You say that for other visual objects the process of scanning the object, the eye scanning, moving over the contour of the object, produces a motor program related to the sound-structure of the word used to name the visual object. This is all very fine and you also have your general system, a general system by which speech sounds are related to particular movements of the arm. For example, vowel sounds are related to straightforward upward movements of the arm with each vowel sound located so to speak at a particular position of the arm, a particular height of the arm. And so on for consonants as well in various classes.”

“How do you arrive at a these relationships - basically how do you arrive at the relationships for individual speech sounds? There is also the question how you arrive at the gestures for function words or the gestures associated with so to speak deictic words, for words pointing to the head and so on of which you have provided a number of examples. How do you arrive at the sounds made by animals through looking at, concentrating on or whatever you do with the sound structure of the word which names the animal?”

These are the obvious questions. People say, have said, "It's all very well for you to assert this but why should we believe it? Can you give us any evidence, empirical evidence, other than your own assertion that these relationships exist? Can you suggest how other people might test the validity of these relationships?" Here's a difficulty. The basic idea is that the relation between gestures and speech sounds, between arm movements and individual speech sounds, is the result of what is described as 'motor equivalence'. Motor equivalence is a well-recognised phenomenon. To sign your name you need a motor program. Motor equivalence means that normally you produce your signature in an orderly way, a regular way, but also you can produce your signature in a variety of other ways, not simply by using your arm and hand. You can produce a signature by using your foot, with a pen in your mouth or in other ways. This means that there must be a higher level program, not simply one specific to the hand and arm, a more abstract program which can be applied to any set of muscles and joints that it is directed to. There is an ability to redirect a program from one normal regular way of expressing a program to another less frequent or more unusual way of expressing the program. What is happening if this occurs? One is altering the direction or location of one's consciousness, one's attention. One is shifting the idea of the program, so to speak, from your hand and arm to your foot. This is something everyone can do, in fact does - move a program from one means of expressing it to another means.

The application to speaking is this. If you say something, speak, what is happening is that a motor program is operating through the array of muscles involved in producing the speech sounds. It's not only muscles but also joints that are being organised; movements of the jawbone and of the bones associated with respiration are taking place. This orchestration of movements produces the word or the sound or whatever it is that the motor program is formed to produce. So, associated with speaking is a motor program similar in every way to the motor programs involved in any ordinary actions: picking up a glass from the table, signing your name, waving your hand. The difference is that this motor program is directed towards the organs of articulation, the 30 muscles controlling the tongue, the muscles of the larynx, the muscles controlling the movement of the jaw, the muscles of respiration. All of these are orchestrated to produce the particular speech sound or the particular word. In the same way as you can redirect a program for signing your name from your hand to your foot, you can redirect the program for producing a speech sound or a word from the muscles and joints involved in speech to the muscles and joints involved in arm movement.

To produce a single speech sound, the sound of the vowel A for example, there must be a specific pattern of motor organisation to coordinate the tongue, the larynx, the lips, breathing and the respiratory system. This motor program has as its effect movement of the air involved in producing the sound, creating the pressures in the air which represent the sound. We have this specific program for the sound of the vowel A. The brain constructs the program, uses the articulatory apparatus to produce the distinctive individual speech sound. The phenomenon of motor equivalence can be used in relation to the motor program for the vowel A in exactly the same way as it is used to shift the signature from hand to foot or wherever. Motor equivalence makes it possible to shift the program for producing the sound A to a program for producing an arm movement or an arm position via a structurally similar patterning, orchestration, of the muscles and joints involved in the position and movement of the arm. This is what is taking place in all the relationships between speech and bodily gesture. A speech sound or a single word in this way can be expressed either vocally or as a movement of another part of the body, in particular of the arm and hand. Motor equivalence is the key for the relationship between speech and gesture..

This is the underlying theory. What about the practical application of the process? The practical point is that we have no difficulty in shifting a motor program for signing our name from one hand and arm to the other hand and arm, to a foot, or whatever. That's easy enough; we do it without the need to think about what's involved in this redirection of the expression of a motor program. But we do need to think about the practical application of motor equivalence of speech and gesture. We have to learn how to perform the same redirection for the motor program involved in producing a speech sound to serve as a motor program for the muscles, bones and joints of the arm and hand. It's a matter of becoming aware in a new way of the process of articulation, of acquiring the ability to concentrate first on the speech sound , on the sound A, and on the muscular organisation on involved in saying A and , then, instead of letting this program go forward to be expressed as a spoken sound, to let it go forward as a program for moving the hand and arm.

The only way this can be verified, the only way you can get empirical testing, so to speak, of this approach is for other people to follow the same process, to apply themselves to the redirection of the motor program for producing a speech sound or a word, to transferring that program to the movements of the hand and arm and so on. That's the only way it can be done. No one denies that you can shift a program for a signature from the hand to the foot. It's a matter of recognising that this shift, this kind of shift, can also be done for speech sounds, the programs involved in producing individual speech sounds and the words they go to form. The systematic relation between speech sounds and bodily movement, between words and associated gestures is constructed by taking each speech sound, vowel or consonant, one by one and observing the arm movements produced when the motor program for the speech sound is redirected to the hand and arm. achieving redirection for every speech sound, vowels and consonants, It is in that way that the tables for the systematic relation between speech sounds and arm movements were constructed as well as equivalent gestures for the range of function words and an array of deictic words.

Now we come to another area where there is a direct relation between the sound and meaning of words, the way in which the names of animals may be related to the sounds which the animals produce. This is also a matter of redirection of word motor programs, another example of motor equivalence. In this case it is also redirection from the organs of articulation, the tongue, larynx etc, particularly the muscles of the tongue and mouth, but the shift involved in the redirection is not external but, so to speak, internal. You take the word, you visualise the sound of it, but instead of letting it be expressed through the ordinary articulatory program which produces speech sounds, you redirect it to what is a more primitive sound-production system, the mechanisms through which non-speech sounds are produced. People generally can imitate animal sounds without much difficulty. Think what's involved in that kind of imitation. You hear an animal sound and you reproduce it. How is it done? There must be a system for producing sounds of any kind, imitating sounds of any kind, regardless of whether they are verbal or not. In evolutionary terms, it is not surprising that there should be such a system; we probably share it with many animals. It is this system which makes it possible often to generate from animal names sounds which resemble the sounds made the by the animals named. One uses the system involved in imitating animal sounds to convert the structure of a word which names an animal into a non-verbal sound – or, more specifically, non-lingual sound where ‘non-lingual’ means a sound made without the use of the tongue.

To redirect the motor program for an animal name 'internally' may initially be more difficult than redirecting a motor program for articulation from the mouth to the arm. To generate the sound from the animal name, one has to redirect the motor program for articulation away from the mechanisms involved in producing speech sounds to the mechanisms required for the more basic ability which we undoubtedly share with many animals which allows us to produce non-speech sounds. To verify this process of generating a reproduction of the sound made by an animal from the structure of the word which names it, the only way is to make the effort to produce the redirection.

“You say you have given an explanation of how speech sounds may be related to arm movements or positions and how words may be related to bodily gesture which is constructed from the elementary speech sounds and their equivalents. And you also said that it's possible to derive something like the sound an animal makes from the sound structures of words which form the names of animals. You said that this is all a question of motor equivalence and the redirection of motor programs from the articulatory system either to the arm and hand or to an earlier sound producing system, the same system as is used for imitating non- speech sounds. You say that the only problem then is for people who want to test the truth of this to learn how to do these redirections of motor programs. That's all very well but that's rather too general. What guidance can you give for how they should set about learning how to do these things?”

One way of starting to understand the sound/meaning relationship is to take some simple words which on the face of them seem to have a link between sound and meaning. This is most obvious for the category which is traditionally called onomatopoeia, all the words or names which seem to contain in themselves a direct imitation of the sound such as cuckoo, ding-dong, and perhaps some noise like hiss - HISS - the word hiss seems to produce the sound HISS. And this leads on to a second category of words where the word seems to produce the action or movement whatever it is which it refers to. This is particularly the case for words which refer to movements of the face. So if you have 'sneer' - say SNEER and it seems to be identical in feeling to the action of sneering whether or not the word is used. This also is the case for HISS which I've just referred to and perhaps other words like this such as SNARL GNASH even BITE - say BITE ! - these words seem to very close in their structure to the actions or whatever it is they refer to.

That seems easy enough. The difficulty starts when one wants to go on to the cases where the relationship between sound and meaning or sound and gesture is less apparent. This is of course the vast bulk of words in any language. The problem then to be taken first at the level of speech sound elements is how typically you derive a movement or arm position from a particular speech sound. Let's take the sound of the vowel A [as in CAT] or think of the range of vowel sounds A E I O U and see how one can approach them.

Let me first describe what I do myself and then see how it may become possible for other people to try and do this. Myself I first think without opening my mouth or making any sound of the sound associated with the speech element A, the vowel A. …… In this little period of silence I'm thinking of the sound associated with the vowel A a a ….It's important to see if you can, not concentrate so much but exclude irrelevant material in your mind as you are thinking about or mentally hearing in the ear of the mind the sound of the A . The next thing I do while having this sound in the mind's ear is to turn my attention to my hand and arm. It's quite straightforward. If something touches your arm you are immediately aware of your arm; if you move your arm about you are aware of your arm. So do these things - either touch the arm or the hand or move the arm about so that you are aware of the arm. There's the arm. The arm is part of your awareness now. Now what you have to do is to bring together the sound in the mind's ear of A and the awareness of the arm. You are going in some way to amalgamate these two items of awareness, or mentally transfer the sound in your mind of the letter A to the awareness of your arm. If you do this and are not distracted by other things you will find that a movement, a position, a change in the arm will occur. This is the first stage in perceiving the relationship between a speech sound element and a position or movement of the hand and arm.

The problem which anyone might now encounter is that whilst it seems to be fairly straightforward to become aware of your arm it may be more difficult to have your mind clear enough to be able to isolate, to hold in your mind only the sound of the particular vowel. This comes back to the general question of how you can have a clear mind, the necessary clear mind. This question of having a clear enough mind is of course one which is tackled for many different purposes in many different ways, by schemes of relaxation by all sorts of systems of meditation and concentration. What's involved is emptying your mind of distractions. How this is to be done is a matter for each individual; there are many techniques which might be used. What is to be achieved put very straightforwardly is 'a calm, clear mind '.

Try a motor theory experiment yourself!

Animated:
Verbs
Nouns
Function words