3 ms·

Infants can distinguish nearly any sound in any language, but not all sounds are important. They lose the ability to distinguish sounds that they don't need to

Infants can distinguish nearly any sound in any language, but not all sounds are important. They lose the ability to distinguish sounds that they don't need to distinguish. The experiment to figure this out is pretty interesting. A native English speaker has no problem distinguishing /θ/ as in "this" from /s/ as in "sis", but not very many languages need you to make this distinction, so people who learn English later in life have a very hard time with it. Likewise, English speakers can't tell the difference between long and short vowels, or long and short consonants. That's because there are no long and short vowels or consonants in English--the distinction doesn't matter. But you'd have a hard time learning Finnish or Japanese without it. And then there are the weird cases, like how in English we have rules for aspirating and voicing /t/ and /k/. If you speak Mandarin then you might pick out /t/ as if it were /d/, but only in certain positions. So "stop" might sound like "sdop", but "top" sounds like "top".

robocat 6y ago
> That's because there are no long and short vowels or consonants in English--the distinction doesn't matter. English has the distinction for vowels and it does matter. “can’t” and “cunt” have the same vowel sound in some accents, but “can’t” needs a long vowel sound while “cunt” needs a short vowel sound. Native English speakers speak those those two words quite distinctly. Lose/loose is another pair (confusingly “lose“ has a long vowel sound and “loose” has a short vowel sound.) Moon needs a long vowel sound to sound right. I am sure you can think of other examples.
- klodolph 6y ago
  You're right, that in some dialects it is different. But to most English dialects, "can't" and "cunt" have completely different vowels, and the length isn't distinguished. "Lose" and "loose" are also distinguished by the voicing, "lose" ends with /z/ and "loose" ends with /s/. Maybe not all dialects.
  - deleted 6y ago
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robocat 6y ago

> That's because there are no long and short vowels or consonants in English--the distinction doesn't matter. English has the distinction for vowels and it does matter. “can’t” and “cunt” have the same vowel sound in some accents, but “can’t” needs a long vowel sound while “cunt” needs a short vowel sound. Native English speakers speak those those two words quite distinctly. Lose/loose is another pair (confusingly “lose“ has a long vowel sound and “loose” has a short vowel sound.) Moon needs a long vowel sound to sound right. I am sure you can think of other examples.

klodolph 6y ago
You're right, that in some dialects it is different. But to most English dialects, "can't" and "cunt" have completely different vowels, and the length isn't distinguished. "Lose" and "loose" are also distinguished by the voicing, "lose" ends with /z/ and "loose" ends with /s/. Maybe not all dialects.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]