Click

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1 Speech sound caused by the sudden opening of an oral air chamber which causes the surrounding air to rush into that chamber. The chamber is formed by a truncated closure at the velum and, for stops, by a further closure-possible for stops—in the front of the oral cavity. Clicks are found in several languages of southern Africa, e.g. in the Khoisan language Nama as well as in the Bantu languages of Zulu and Xhosan. In African language studies and in the International Phonetic Alphabet (1989) the following notations are customary: , I, II, ! (these correspond to the following symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (1979): , , [¿], [C]). The sound that occurs, for example in a kiss, is a labial click: .

phonetics

2 Acoustic signal used in psycholinguistic tests on speech recognition and language production to determine the psychological reality of grammatical units. In several investigations subjects were exposed simultaneously to linguistic utterances in one ear and click signals in the other ear. In these tests, clicks were remembered exactly at constituent boundaries, while clicks within constituents were displaced in their memories to constituent boundaries (‘click displacement’). By changing the click position in this way the hypothesis could be confirmed that constituents play a more decisive role in speech recognition than other grammatical units (syllables, words) since they immediately serve the formation of propositions.

Bever, T.G.

1970. The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J.R.Hayes (ed.), Cognition and the development of language. 279–352.

Kimball, J.P. 1973. Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition 2. 15–47.

Levelt, W.J.M. 1974. Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics, vol. 3: Psycholinguistic applications. The Hague.

[ psycholinguistics]

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