As any skill, speaking involves the interaction of several processing components. Even pre-theoretically, it is obvious that speaking at least comprises a level of intentions and ideas, a level of words and sentences, and a level of sound production or articulation. These three levels of processing have their own
characteristic speeds of operation. In normal fluent speech, new elementary ideas (roughly corresponding to the occurrence of main verbs) come at the (average) speed of about one every 4-5 sec. The generation of ideas to be expressed in speech is a relatively slow strategic process. Individual words are
produced at a rate of about two or three per second. This is already quite fast; retrieving words is a largely automatic process. Individual speech sounds, finally, are produced at machine gun rate, some 10-15 per second. The process is fully automatic; there is no way for the speaker to ponder about choosing an /a/ or an
/o/, a fk/ or a /p/.