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Critical learning period debate settled | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6054 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 41 of 49 29 May 2011 at 4:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I honestly still don't understand this myself. For example, how can someone not tell the difference between the Chinese "q" and "ch" sound? They just sound totally different. Is it because it is being processed as speech sounds? Do most people have trouble separating the meaning of the sounds from the actual sounds they are hearing? If they sounds were played in isolation, or if the pair of sounds were played backwards (taking away the meaning of the sounds), surely then people would hear the difference. I mean, they can obviously physically hear the difference, but somehow just because they are processing it as speech it destroys the difference? Obviously producing the sounds is another matter of muscles, but this issue of perception just baffles me. I don't want to make myself sound super special, but I have never had any problems hearing foreign sounds and recognizing the difference. Surely I don't have the "mind of a baby". I find it baffling that some people literally perceive no difference, or can't hear their own bad accent. Perhaps it is because I have strove to recognize or mimic sounds in music as a composer that I have learned to separate the sound from the meaning? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5195 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 42 of 49 29 May 2011 at 8:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
But failing to distinguish those does not result in any confusion because there is zero overlap in the finals that they can be combined with as shown here in this ZhuYin Table. If someone says qi as in the first four letters of cheese, they will be understood clearly. If someone says chu as in the first four letters of choose, they will be understood clearly. In fact any distinctions here would be minute compared to the regional variations that exist in correct, spoken Mandarin. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6054 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 43 of 49 29 May 2011 at 8:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I wasn't talking about the consequences of failing to distinguish those, rather the reason why. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chirel Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5314 days ago 125 posts - 159 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: French | Message 44 of 49 29 May 2011 at 10:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In Finnish we have only one foneme for /k/, but it is representd by a different sound in front of every vowel. My
son heard this when he was three or four and wanted to lear to read. He just couldn't understand why I said that the beginning of kala and kola is the same. Also it doesn't matter if you put aspiration in there or even some voicing in some cases (although we have words with /g/). They are all interpreted as /k/. Now if a Finn has not been accustomed to the sound systems of other languages it would be very possible that s/he would not be able to make the difference between two such sounds because they have had no reason to make such distinction in L1. They can learn it with practice. My phonetics teacher explained this with a picture. He drew a parabel for L1 that has only one phoneme The highest poin represents the most typical example and the two narrow tails the sounds that could pass as /k/. On top of this parabel he drew two others for L2 that has two phonemes. Part of both of these would overlap with /k/, and part would fall outside the first parabel. But since most of these two parabels would be in roughly the same area as /k/ in L1 they would be interpreted as /k/ and the rest would be a kind of 'funny /k/'. With practice the person can start to hear and produce the difference in the two phonemes that s/he earlier though to be the same as /k/ in L1. Does this answer the 'why'? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6015 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 45 of 49 29 May 2011 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's exactly it. Processing every sound explicitly would take too much time, so it just can't be done. Instead, the brain categorises things as phonemes by "best fit".
Conscious listening is different from live performance. Most English people can tell the difference between "lock" and "loch" in isolation, but phone them up and say "I'll meet you by the lo??" and they wouldn't know which you'd said, because when they're listening to speech, they are listening phonemically, and they don't have the /x/ phoneme. (This can lead to some confusion if you're on a boat trip along the Caledonian Canal with Englishmen on your crew, because there's locks at each end of the three lochs. :-) )
But now we have an intractable problem. You are only aware of your ability to hear foreign sounds when you are listening consciously. In live performance, you may miss them, but you would never know. However, as a musician, you probably do have an advantage: you have another frame of reference for the "meaning" of sounds. After all, the characteristics of a phoneme are very much like the characteristics of a particular instrument (or a particular technique on an instrument): harmonics, breathiness/white-noise content, "popping" vs smooth start etc. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6054 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 46 of 49 30 May 2011 at 8:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Interesting. Great points there Cainntear.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5434 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 47 of 49 31 May 2011 at 2:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Sorry to interrupt the phonology debate here, but I found this interesting article on the advantages of bilingualism, not the least of which is that it safeguards against early Alzheimer. It's a bit tangential to the main debate here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.htm l I couldn't help quoting the article when the journalist asks the researcher if she is bilingual: "Q. Are you bilingual? A. Well, I have fully bilingual grandchildren because my daughter married a Frenchman. When my daughter announced her engagement to her French boyfriend, we were a little surprised. It’s always astonishing when your child announces she’s getting married. She said, “But Mom, it’ll be fine, our children will be bilingual!”" Now, why is the researcher not bilingual? It just never happened or was it too late? Edited by s_allard on 31 May 2011 at 2:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 48 of 49 31 May 2011 at 7:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I love that the thread with the name "Critical learning period debate settled" is now on its seventh page of discussion. :)
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