Janice Reynolds, age 13, of Sarasota, Fla., for her question:
HOW DO PEOPLE TALK?
Lots of things affect the way you talk. Your mouth, tongue, teeth and lips help shape the sounds of your voice and color and resonance is given through the nasal cavity. When you come down with a cold, your nasal passages become stopped up and your voice is very definitely changed. But the most important equipment for allowing you to talk is found in the throat.
Main producers of sounds that come out of your mouth are your vocal cords. These are two rather small bands of tissue in your throat which stretch across your voice box or larynx. One band stretches on each side of your windpipe opening. Muscles in your larynx stretch and relax the vocal cords.
Man's voice is highly developed. Other animals can make sounds, but none can express complex ideas through a variety of arrangements of consonants and vowel sounds as can man.
You can use your voice for making a wide variety of noises, for singing and talking. Your ability to make so many different sounds is actually linked to another secret weapon: you also have the ability to think.
When you breathe, you relax your vocal cords so they form a V shaped opening that allows air through.
When you speak, you pull the vocal cords by the attached muscles, narrowing the opening. Then, as you drive air from the lungs through the larynx, the air vibrates the tightened vocal cords and sounds result.
Your voice equipment is so well organized that you can use your vocal cords, muscles and lungs in a wide variety of combinations without even thinking about it.
The more tightly your vocal cords are stretched, the higher the sound you produce. The more relaxed your cords are, the lower the sound. In your normal speech, vocal cords are first stretched and then relaxed to produce a variety of sounds.
A voice's pitch is set by the size of the larynx. Women usually have voices that are higher pitched than men's because their vocal cords generally are shorter. Boys and girls usually have vocal cords that are about the same size until the boys reach puberty. At that time the voice boxes of boys suddenly grow larger and their voices generally change to a lower pitch.
If you strain your voice, it can affect your vocal cords. Muscular tension caused by nervousness can also do the same thing.
An inflamation of the larynx is called laryngitis. The inflamed, infected and irritated tissue can either make you talk in only a whisper or force you to remain silent for several days.