Conversation, Ambiguity, and the Daily Improviser

Quick – say the following sentence out loud: “I heard it on NPR.”

Now say it again – and this time take note of whether you’re pronouncing it “EN-pee-arr” or “EM-pee-arr.”

If you’re like most people, you’re probably saying the latter. Chances are you never noticed how your lips close into the “P” position before your tongue completes the articulation of the “N” that precedes it, resulting in an unintended “M” sound. Yet anyone familiar with National Public Radio would still probably easily interpret what you’re saying.

This overlapping of vocalized sounds is called coarticulation. As Steven Pinker points out in his book The Language Instinct, the ability to make sense of coarticulated sounds is one of the things that keeps humans from playing John Henry to any voice-recognition machine yet devised.

But it strikes me that this human facility to parse the elements of coarticulated sounds throws another wrench in the works when it comes to achieving an elusive goal I described in an earlier article – that of seeing and hearing things “as they really are.” As Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan say in their book The Three Laws of Performance, mastery is a state in which there is “nothing between you and the thing you’re dealing with.” In Zaffron and Logan’s view, “if you have beliefs, expectations, hopes, fears about [a] situation, mastery means putting these on the shelf so you are not looking through them at what is in front of you.”

But Pinker’s speculation about how we deal with coarticulation reveals an immediate challenge we face in trying to perceive things “as they really are” – a challenge that lies at the level of basic human physiology. In describing one school of thought as to how we properly interpret coarticulated sounds, Pinker says:

“Maybe we are constantly guessing what a speaker will say next, using every scrap of conscious and unconscious knowledge at our disposal, from how coarticulation distorts sounds, to the rules of English phonology, to the rules of English syntax, to stereotypes about who tends to do what to whom in the world, to hunches about what our conversational partner has in mind at that very moment.”

If this is how we resolve the ambiguity in coarticulated sounds, it would imply that communication couldn’t take place at all unless we did continually “hear what we expect to hear.” This would be a formidable physiological barrier to overcome in our attempts to perceive things “as they really are.”

But maybe this mountain ain’t high enough to prevent the attainment of mastery after all, as Pinker proceeds to demonstrate by citing an unlikely source: Rock and roll lyrics. As Bruce Springsteen might or might not have said, we’ll wrap it up like a deuce next time.