Is the mouth a muscle?

The mouth is an orifice, but the tongue is basically a muscle and your mandible and lips are controlled by muscles. I don't think they necessarily build like your biceps or quads do.

RileyG said:

...or does "talking" act like a muscle?

For reference: It seems when I say certain written prayers out loud over a period of time, I can easily memorize them without looking them up.

Click to expand...

You will memorize them after a time without saying them out loud. So that should tell you if your mouth is exhibiting 'muscle memory'.

RileyG said:

I find it easier to memorize things if I say them out loud, but you’re completely right

Click to expand...

There is muscle memory. But that's just your brain becoming used to a pattern of movement to the point where it shunts control of the muscle(s) out of the conscious area of your brain and you start doing them automatically. Just consider doing up your shoelaces. You don't specifically think 'make a loop here, twist it just so, tuck it around here..'. You can do it without thinking. But it's not your fingers that have the memory.

Funnily enough, if you do try to think it through it can be difficult bringing up the conscious memory of how it's done. And it can be weird consciously watching your fingers do something reasonably complex without direct input from you. Your fingers seem to operate independently. It's a little spooky...

Bradskii said:

Funnily enough, if you do try to think it through it can be difficult bringing up the conscious memory of how it's done. And it can be weird consciously watching your fingers do something reasonably complex without direct input from you. Your fingers seem to operate independently. It's a little spooky...

Click to expand...

This is especially true for someone like me who spent over twenty years of my life looping under, only to learn that the correct way is to loop over. Please don't confuse me by making me stop to think about it.

RileyG said:

...or does "talking" act like a muscle?

For reference: It seems when I say certain written prayers out loud over a period of time, I can easily memorize them without looking them up.

Does our "mouth" get stronger as we repeat the same thing over and over? Is it considered a "muscle" in a sense?

Blessings

Click to expand...

The jaws are controlled by muscles. Like other muscles, they can atrophy from disuse, so I would think they can get stronger from use. I know this because "I had a friend" who was heavily addicted to drugs which left him with no appetite for food for long periods of time. When he finally needed to eat, he could not eat solid foods because his mouth was weak from disuse and it was painful, so he had to start back to eating with soft stuff like pudding and Vienna sausages. Eventually his mouth got stronger.

RileyG said:

...or does "talking" act like a muscle?

For reference: It seems when I say certain written prayers out loud over a period of time, I can easily memorize them without looking them up.

Does our "mouth" get stronger as we repeat the same thing over and over? Is it considered a "muscle" in a sense?

Blessings

Click to expand...

There have been a number of studies which have shown that memory can be enhanced by speaking/reading out loud.

It appears to be a combination of the act of speaking plus hearing yourself speak locking the info into your brain.

One trick for remembering the name of someone you just met is to speak the name as soon as possible and as often as possible after being introduced.

I will occasionally go upstairs, get distracted and forget why I needed to go upstairs (it's an age thing). I've found that speaking out loud the reason for the trip, before I start, helps with recall.

Fortunately, I live alone.

OB

From an articulatory phonetics standpoint, what you are doing whenever you are learning to make speech sounds is in essence learning to move your articulators (the parts of the vocal tract involved in channeling the airflow in such a way as to produce the distinct sounds of the world's languages) in order to hit certain 'targets', which involves moving the parts involved (e.g., the tongue, the vocal folds, the pharynx, etc.) until you reach what will be registered by whoever is teaching you the language or otherwise interacting with you in that language as corresponding to [x], [f], [p], or whatever the sound you're aiming to produce is. This is one of the reasons why it is more difficult to learn to speak languages with sound inventories that are vastly different than that of your own language, whether that's vowels (which can be deceptively difficult; think of how many English monolinguals have difficulty with the 'pure' vowels of Spanish), consonants (if a language has consonant sounds that your language just doesn't have, so there's no way you can do the "ch as in chair" type of example), consonant clusters (some languages allow consonant clusters that are either entirely disallowed in your language, or allow consonant clusters that are found in your language in places within words where they are disallowed in your language, e.g., Russian allows word-initial "ts", whereas English does not, despite having "ts" in words like "hats"; Coptic has word-initial consonant clusters like "nt", since [n] is a what is a called a "syllabic consonant", i.e., it can act as a syllable on its own, since it is a sonorant -- note how you can produce the sound "nnnnnn" for as long as you continue pushing air through your nose, with no need for a vowel sound anywhere around it).

In this specific way, I believe that the mouth can be treated like a muscle or thought of like a muscle, even though it in itself is not a muscle. There are too many individual parts inside of it involved in speech to talk about the mouth in a unitary sense like that, though as USIncognito pointed out, the tongue is basically a muscle. It's important to recognize in any case that what you are experiencing when memorizing prayers in your own language is likely to be a lot more automatic (~ easier to remember) than the process of learning entirely new ways to use your articulators in the first place, as when learning a new language, since there aren't going to be any new or unexpected sounds or patterns of sounds involved, so you're not 'training' the mouth in the same way.

Occams Barber said:

There have been a number of studies which have shown that memory can be enhanced by speaking/reading out loud.

It appears to be a combination of the act of speaking plus hearing yourself speak locking the info into your brain.

Study finds reading information aloud to yourself improves memory | Waterloo News

You are more likely to remember something if you read it out loud, a study from the University of Waterloo has found. A recent Waterloo study found that speaking text aloud helps to get words into long-term memory. Dubbed the “production effect,” the study determined that it is the dual action...

uwaterloo.ca

One trick for remembering the name of someone you just met is to speak the name as soon as possible and as often as possible after being introduced.

I will occasionally go upstairs, get distracted and forget why I needed to go upstairs (it's an age thing). I've found that speaking out loud the reason for the trip, before I start, helps with recall.

Fortunately, I live alone.

OB

Click to expand...

I go back to where i was when i thought
to go for something.
I tend to think in pictures so that
whats in my mind not the name of item.
Sometimes its in the form of our character
for the item, which is itself a picture.

Just for he record, the right and left masseters, which are the muscles that close the mouth, are the strongest muscles in the body for their size. Working together (with some assistance from lateral scalp muscles) they can close the jaw with a force of over 90kg (200 lbs) on the molars. So, to protect your teeth, don’t clench your jaw when you get angry.