On Apr 21, 2008, at 12:53 PM, Matt Mahoney wrote:
Like English speakers learning Hindu cannot learn to speak the 3
different
versions of the 'k' sound because they sound the same.
In my experience it is not so much that they sound the same but that
we don't know how to say them (in terms of mouth mechanics) such that
we can isolate the difference between sounds that would have been in
the range of a single phoneme in English. I had that problem learning
other 'k' sounds (not Hindi though). I figured that out when trying
to teach people the different sounds in the range of 't' and 'th' that
have languages that contain only one (or languages which have one that
is neither English 't' nor 'th', like some Asian languages).
My problem learning new sounds was not from an inability to hear the
difference but finding someone who could explain what the difference
was, which can really only be usefully described by the difference in
mechanics of generating the sound (most people attempt to explain by
example, which is clearly useless). It has less to do with not being
able to hear the difference and more to do with not knowing which
differences are important and which are noise.
The part of the brain responsible for
auditory phoneme recognition becomes read-only by age 6. So we all
speak
foreign languages learned at later ages with an accent.
This appears trivially falsifiable. While I know it seems true in
many cases, I know of a few people who came to the US from Asia in the
mid-teens who speak perfect accent-free American English that was
learned when they moved to the US. Quite a phoneme change from tonal
East Asian languages, and you would never know they were not born here.
J. Andrew Rogers
-------------------------------------------
agi
Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/
Modify Your Subscription:
http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
