My favourite party trick is to play my friends a tape of Queen?s 1975 hit Bohemian Rhapsody, especially the part in the middle in which singer Freddie Mercury launches into a his own 30-second Italian opera. The trick is that I play it backwards. Everyone is fooled - but only for about two seconds, after which everyone collapses in the laughter of recognition. For even when played backwards, Freddie Mercury?s mock-operatic chorus of ?Oooh, Lellilag! Oooh, Lellilag!? is instantly recognizable as ?Galileo! Galileo!?
The recognition of speech is more than a matter of decoding the strings of sounds that make up words. The context of speech - its intonation and the cadences of the words - is just as important. Every comedian knows that it?s not the joke that matters, but the way it is told; any tourist in a strange land knows that gestures and expressions convey a wealth of meaning, and anyone with an infant or a dog knows that meaning can be conveyed as much by the tone of your voice as by what you actually say. If Rover is told sternly enough not to dig up the dahlias, Rover will refrain from doing so (or at least look very guilty.)
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution