In the preceding chapter, we investigated the physical production of speech sounds in
terms of the articulatory mechanisms of the human vocal tract. That investigation was
possible because of some rather amazing facts about the nature of language. When we
considered the human vocal tract, we didn’t have to specify whether we were talking about
a fairly large person, over six feet tall, weighing over 200 pounds, or about a rather small
person, about five feet tall, weighing less than 100 pounds. Yet those two physically
different individuals would inevitably have physically different vocal tracts, in terms of
size and shape. In a sense, every individual has a physically different vocal tract.
Consequently, in purely physical terms, every individual will pronounce sounds
differently. There are, then, potentially millions of physically different ways of saying
the simple word me.