Everybody who has studied a foreign language knows that learning the words is a major part of mastering the language. Knowing the words is not sufficient, but it surely is necessary. When we learn a word we store in our memory information that allows us both to say the word and to recognize it when said by someone else. And the reason we do not hear words when spoken to in a foreign language is that we have not learned them, we do not have them in our linguistic memory, i.e., in the part of our memory dedicated to language. Speaking A plausible account of an act of speaking might run as follows.
Speakers select from their memories the words they wish to say.
They then perform a special kind of gymnastics with their speech organs or articulators, i.e., with the tongue, lips, velum, and larynx. The gymnastics results in an acoustic signal that both the speaker and the interlocutors hear. Since in performing the gymnastics speakers do not pause at the end of each word, the words in the utterance run into one another. Consider now the gymnastics that we execute as we pronounce the English words 'meet' and 'Mott'. In both words we begin with an action closing the oral cavity with the lips and end with an action by the tongue blade closing the oral cavity at a point in the anterior region of the hard palate.