Status Updates From Psycholinguistics (Oxford I...

To err is human.

Where does the very beginning of any spoken utterance come from? What sparks speech? These are difficult questions to answer, partly because we still don't know enough about how language is produced, but partly because they deal with mental abstractions so vague that they elude empirical investigation.

It is no accident, of course, that the oldest science is astronomy and the newest is psychology, for distance not only prompts curiosity, it also fosters observational objectivity.