Pinker — “In the speech sound wave, one word runs…”

Source: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language — Steven Pinker

Book page: pinker-language-instinct

From: Steven Pinker — Quotes

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In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.