# Words to SDR? **URL:** https://discourse.numenta.org/t/words-to-sdr/3660 **Category:** Engineering **Created:** [March 20, 2018, 12:16am UTC](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/words-to-sdr/3660 "2018-03-20T00:16:48Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 28

### Author: ![Bitking](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/discourse.numenta.org/bitking/32/3099_2.png) [@Bitking](https://discourse.numenta.org/u/Bitking) #### Post date: [November 27, 2018, 1:38pm UTC](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/words-to-sdr/3660/28 "2018-11-27T13:38:59Z")

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I agree - syllables are a stand-in for phonemes. For the bystander watching this exchange: > **[Phoneme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme)** > > In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme (/ˈfoʊniːm/) is a set of phones that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. > For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west of England, the sound patterns /sɪn/ (sin) and /sɪŋ/ (sing) are two separate words that are distinguished by the substitution of one phoneme, /n/, for another phoneme, /ŋ/. Two words like this that differ in meaning through the contrast of a single... When I was working with the AVOS company (Assistive technology for the visually impaired) I became very interested in speech IO and the production of speech sounds. I discovered that the sounds of speech are an artifact of the kinds of sounds that the human speech production hardware was capable of making. Please examine the charts on page 15 of this lecture: [http://research.cs.tamu.edu/prism/lectures/sp/l3.pdf](http://research.cs.tamu.edu/prism/lectures/sp/l3.pdf) You can see that there is are maps of the various sounds that a human is capable of making and the sounds are “fixed points” on these maps that are distinct enough that they can be reliably produced and recognized. I totally agree - speech sounds are not thinking. I suspect that this is a large part of the reason that AI approaches that are text/speech based have not been very successful. That said - speaking really does engage and expand the mental hardware. Humans without speech really are not what most of us think of a fully human. I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about this and have commented on this before: > [@Language the base of conscious thought?](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/language-the-base-of-conscious-thought/3629/5): > > Language is partly innate and partially learned. We have the necessary mental hardware but without the social training, we can’t learn the tricks that come with developing the motor skills that we call language. Learning these motor skills come with a corresponding training of the matching sensory skill set. Part of this learned skill set is symbolic representation. There are sad cases of people that are raised without learning language past the critical period for language plasticity. It has … While it sounds difficult to extract and represent the underlying symbols of the communication of thought it seems that google is mucking around with that very thing with their translate project: > **[Zero-Shot Translation with Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation...](https://blog.research.google/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-with-googles.html)** Again - for the interested bystander - Want to learn more? This is one of the first books I read on these topics, A classic top to bottom text on the entire chain of speech from speaker to listener: > **[The Speech Chain: The Physics And Biology Of Spoken Language , Denes, Dr. Peter...](https://www.amazon.com/Speech-Chain-Physics-Biology-Language-ebook/dp/B01KUGU7CO)** > > The Speech Chain: The Physics And Biology Of Spoken Language - Kindle edition by Denes, Dr. Peter B., Pinson, Dr. Elliot N.. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and... --- _[View the full topic](https://discourse.numenta.org/t/words-to-sdr/3660)._