“It’s been demonstrated that subjects who are shown a video of someone saying ‘ga’ that is accompanied by a recording of the sound ‘ba’ perceive something entirely different. They will ‘hear’ ‘da’, which in terms of speech production is in between the ‘ga’ and ‘ba’ sounds” Christine Kenneally, The First Word pg 150

“gesture and speech are so integral to each other that researchers are able to predict a child’s language ability at three years of age based on its gesturing at one year” Christine Kenneally, The First Word pg 134

“Often people with severe brain damage remain able to swear even when they are unable to produce other language” Christine Kenneally, The First Word pg 116

“the only difference between a b and a p is that you vibrate your vocal cords much sooner for the former than the latter. With a b, voicing occurs within twenty-five milliseconds of opening your lips; with a p, your vocal cords start vibrating more than twenty-five milliseconds after you open your lips. Because Parkinson’s patients experience a breakdown in the onset timing of voicing in speech sounds, some of their b’s sound like p’s, and vice versa.” Christine Kenneally, The First Word pg 77

“there’s no real silence between the words in any given utterances… Whatever silence [is]… mainly when sounds like k and p are made (like at the beginning and end of “cup”) Christine Kenneally, The First Word

“when babies babble, they produce all the possible sounds of all human languages, randomly generating phonemes from Japanese to English to Swahili” Christine Kenneally, The First Word pg 142