Listen, my children, tonight we praise

The deeds that were done in those distant days

When the Labs was young (before it grew

To its present size), by a happy few,

Beginning in nineteen thirty-five.

In that dawn it was bliss to be alive

(Or so, at least, some poet said)

And follow Nature wherever she led.

Haskins and Enzmann x-rayed flies,

Changing the color of their offsprings’ eyes;

Hutner pursued his remarkable hunch

As to what a bacterium has for lunch;

And Provasoli discovered the key

To algae, the cereals of the sea.

Then Frank built a playback; it went round and round

And turned a speech spectrogram back into sound,

And he and Al and Pierre found the cues

That separate [bu]’s from the [du]’s and the [gu]’s.

Others soon joined them. Arthur and Leigh

Measured the values of VOT,

Reaching, in their investigation,

The limits of human aspiration.

And Kathy wired up all of her friends

So she could observe what a speaker intends.

But maybe, my children, you’re wondering whether

There’s some common thread that ties all this together?

There is, but be patient a moment or two,

My story begins with a very strange cue.

For a stop, its the slope of a formant, F2,

That cues [di] versus [bi] and [du] versus [bu].

Now the trick that you do with your tongue tip for [di]

Is the same trick you do with your tongue tip for [du]

But the slope of F2 that cues [di] and not [bi]

Is not the same slope that cues [du] and not [bu]]

It’s acoustics that does it. If you really want

To understand how, when you’re older, read Fant.

Now what comes to my ear is this strange F2 cue

But I can’t even tell

If it rose or it fell

Though that’s easy to do

For the sound of a bell

Does it rise? Does it fall?

I can’t hear it at all!

Yes I know very well

When I listen to you

That what you just said isn’t [bu], but is [du].

What explains this peculiar result we have found?

Well, here is our theory. (The latest revision

Is Alvin and I, in press, Cognition.)

It’s the gesture that matters and never the sound.

There’s a vocal-tract analog here in my head

That moves in accordance with what you’ve just said.

When you make the tongue gesture for [d] as in [du]

This thing in my head makes the tongue gesture, too.

And that’s how I know you said [du] and not [bu].

And that’s why squawks, burps, chirps, bleats, hisses and howls

Are different from fricatives, stops, glides and vowels.

Other sounds in their way are all very well –

the squeak of a door, the toll of a bell –

But I hear all those sounds quite simple and plain

‘Cause I don’t have a door or a bell in my brain.

Chirps and glissandi

Are fine and dandy.

But this is what all our experiments teach us;

They just aren’t special in the way that speech is.

Like most other animals in Creation

We humans are born with a specialization.

The fish in the sea have pheromones

That stimulate their erogenous zones.

The barn owl’s got such peculiar ears

That it’s able to see whatever it hears.

The bat’s got sonar, the bird’s got song,

The spider’s got webs, and if we’re not wrong

The thing that’s remarkable and unique

About human beings is that they speak.

So to bring to an end this lengthy apology,

And answer the question that you were askin’,

And call a truce

With Dr. Seuss,

It’s all biology

Here at Haskins.