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I wanted to add that while in my PhD program I was studying this effect for a little while. In studies on ferrets scientists have discovered that the second aud
by tel 13y ago
I wanted to add that while in my PhD program I was studying this effect for a little while. In studies on ferrets scientists have discovered that the second auditory cortex, A2, tends to collect sonic motifs—things like a quickly rising pitch beginning near middle C, or any kind of warbling, or clear, constant tones at various pitches. Computationally, these motifs can be adapted to a particular corpus in order to improve detection and prediction rates while using a smaller bank of motifs. There's also lots of investigation into how these motif banks can improve robustness to distortions and noise.
As far as I know, it remains speculation that this effect occurs in humans, but it seems by your experiences (and my own learning Mandarin as a second language) plausible that the human brain itself "prunes" less useful sonic motifs in early life improving your ability to rapidly understand your primary language(s) even under shifts in accent or other distortions. This would likely come at the cost of literal inability to be attentive to motifs that haven't been stored. you would perceive them in A1, but they would have less resolution and perhaps semantic meaning (this is as far as I know quite wild speculation, mind).
I remember that it took almost an entire 6 mos of study before I really had a clue what tonality in Mandarin meant—I could hear it, but never perceive it as a linguistic phenomenon. After 6 months it appeared to almost overnight become something sensible to me at which point I had to relearn almost my entire vocabulary including the tonal information that I'd been unknowingly ignoring.
- diydsp 13y agowarning: anecdote of 1 here. but one time my native Japanese roommate and I were playing with a real-time audio spectrum analyzer and I was demonstrating the difference b/t "l" and "r" and she simply could not hear the difference. As tokenadult mentions, it is brutally hard to learn these distinctions. perhaps that is why successful founders push their way past accent problems; they are successful as pushing through brutally hard problems.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago'l' is made with the tongue starting at the top of the mouth and striking the bottom, 'r' the tongue stays at the bottom, and the Japanese 'l/r' has the tongue at the top but touching the back of the teeth and it pulls away but it doesn't hit the bottom of the mouth. If you put your finger in your mouth and hold your tongue down you can still make an 'r' sound, but 'l' is impossible, as is 'l/r'.
- joyeuse6701 13y agoGood explanation, I've used it before. Polish is similar in the lack of a 'th' sound which is usually replaced with a 'f' sound: Think becomes Fink. Was always funny growing up to me.
- bad_user 13y agoHah - Romanian also doesn't have "th" and so beginners tend to replace it with "z".
- jholman 13y agoI can't speak to the articulation of ら &c, but I don't agree with aspects of your description of English articulation. When pronouncing an 'l' (alveolar lateral), my tongue stays on alveolar ridge of my mouth (the roof, right behind the teeth) for the entire time. When the 'l' sound ends, my tongue leaves the roof of my mouth, but it never "strikes the bottom" of my mouth. If there's a vowel next, it moves to a neutral position for a vowel. If the 'l' was the end of the speech, it just kind of sits in place for a second after the noise stops. If it's followed by another consonant, it moves for that articulation (e.g. when saying "all the sounds", it moves directly from the alveolar ridge to the teeth for the dental fricative). When pronouncing an 'r' (alveolar approximant), I, and I think most English speakers, roll the tongue backwards to some degree (although not enough that the point of articulation is the bottom of the tongue). I.e. the tongue does not "stay at the bottom". Yes, it is certainly possible to pronounce an English 'r' with the tip of your tongue held down (unlike 'l'), but I think most English speakers would find this "impossible" at first, and then with a minute of practice would realize that it was possible but difficult. In English, these two articulations are perceived as the same phoneme; I assume that some language somewhere differentiates between them. I notice that often when I speak (English) to natives of India (whose first languages I have not identified), I get the sense that they have a richer complex of 'r' noises than I do. In summary, "l" does not involve "striking the bottom [of the mouth]", and "r" typically does not involve the tongue staying at the bottom of the mouth, although it can.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
- BenSS 13y agoThat's a really interesting observation. I've got hearing damage in the high frequencies, so I'm incapable of hearing the difference between an 'f' and an 's'. Fir and Sir sound identical to me, and I can only infer from context! However, I can -speak- them due to the difference in mouth and tongue placement + av therapy.
- dchichkov 13y agoA small correction here - A2 is a secondary auditory cortex (as in 'secondary stage of processing'). [it's just that the phrase 'second auditory cortex', especially in the context of discussing a process of acquiring a second language sounds suggestive of a development of another separate part. and A2 is definitely not that.]
- tel 13y agoOh! Yeah, definitely did not mean to imply that. I was interpreting it to myself to mean "second stage in an audio processing pipeline" as that was what I had been modeling.
- jamesli 13y agoI want to add an interesting personal experience. My native language is a Northeastern dialect in China. The dialect doesn't distinguish well the sounds between /z/ and /zh/, between /c/ and /ch/, and between /s/ and /sh/. I went to Beijing for college, started speaking Mandarin, and picked it up quickly. But until now, I still regularly make the mistake between /z/ and /zh/, and the other two pair. I am able to easily tell the differences between the sounds themselves. If the sounds are included in a sentence, however, I simply can't tell which is which. Here is the interesting part. I have no difficulty in distinguishing these sounds in English. I can clearly hear the differences between words like 'sip' or 'ship', no matter if they are spoken as single words or are part of a sentence. My ears will immediately catch the difference. But if it is Mandarin, i will get lost between words like 'ziji' and 'zhiji'.
- tel 13y agoYeah, I personally feel that there's a great deal of "modality" in the sonic motifs we are attuned to. It can be remarkable how palpably different "listening in English" is from "listening in Mandarin".