ustify"> Older and younger adults can guess fairly accurately the chronological age of elderly individuals by listening to them speak [Caruso, Mueller, and Xue, 1994]. However, physiological age rather than chronological age may be a better predictor of who is perceived as having an aging voice [Ramig and Ringel, 1983]. Respiration and phonation are most affected by the aging process. Older people may have a restricted loudness range due to reduced vital capacity.
Similarly, consider the words: burglar, loudly, sneezed, the. Here, only three combinations are possible: The burglar sneezed loudly, Loudly sneezed the burglar and (perhaps) The burglar loudly sneezed. All others are impossible, such as * The loudly burglar sneezed, or * Sneezed burglar loudly the. Note also that had the four words been burglars, a, sneezes, loudly, there is no way in which these could be combined to make a well-formed sentence. * A burglars is an impossible combination, and so is * burglars sneezes. In brief, English places firm restrictions on which items can occur together, and the order in which they come. From this, it follows that there is also a fixed set of possibilities for the substitution of items. In the word bats, for example, a could be replaced by e or i, but not by h or z, which would give * bhts or * bzts. In the sentence The burglar sneezed loudly, the word burglar could be replaced by cat, butcher, robber, or even (in a children's story) by engine or shoe - but it could not be replaced by into, or amazingly, or they, which would give ill-formed sequences such as * The into sneezed loudly or * The amazingly sneezed loudly. Every item in language, then, has its own characteristic place in the total pattern. It can combine with certain specified items, and be replaced by others (Figure 4).
The - burglar - sneezed - loudly-robber - coughed - softly-cat - hissed - noisily
Figure 4
Language can therefore be regarded as an intricate network of interlinked elements in which every item is held in its place and given its identity by all the other items. No item (apart from the names of some objects) has an independent validity or existence outside that pattern. The elements of language can be likened to the players in a game of soccer. A striker, or a goal-keeper, has no use or value outside the game. But placed among the other players, a striker acquires an identity and value. In the same way, linguistic items such as the, been, very, only acquire significance as part of a total language network.Let us now look again at the network of interlocking items which constitutes language. A closer inspection reveals another, more basic way in which language differs among the speakers.Look at the sentences: The penguin squawked, It squawked, The penguin which slipped on the ice squawked. Each of these sentences has a similar basic structure consisting of a subject and a verb (Figure 5).
Figure 5
The penguin It The penguin which slipped on the icesquawked
The number of words in each sentence is no guide whatsoever to its basic structure. Simple counting operations are quite irrelevant to language. For example, suppose someone was trying to work out how to express the past in English. They would have no success at all if they tried out ...
