A full speech communication chain spans brain, vocal organs, channel, and hearing.

Evidence

The speech communication chain is characterized in Figure 5.1. This model pays attention to the source →channel →receiver structure of communication, but also to the generative process within the speaker and the analysis chain at the receiver. The speaker combines a linguistic message (such as words to be said) with non-linguistic information (rhythm, stress, and intonation of the words) at neural processing levels, constructs motoric control signals for the speech organs, and produces a spoken message conveyed by an acoustic waveform. The communication channel can be any medium, such as a pressure wave in the air, a wired or wireless telephone channel, voice over internet (VoIP), radio, or storage (= temporal transfer) by a recording device. Finally, the receiver is a subject who, in favourable conditions, is able to uncover a meaningful representation from the content of the message. Peripheral hearing is first used to extract a general auditory representation, and then more speech-specific processes are involved to decode the linguistic contents. Sometimes the non-linguistic content can be more important than the linguistic one. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 539

Categorization

• DEFINE: The end-to-end source-channel-receiver speech model, including the point that non-linguistic prosody can outweigh words.
• XREF: The 1948 Shannon-Weaver linear communication model maps onto this source-channel-receiver speech chain.