4 ms·
It's been well documented that around 8-10 months, infants lose the ability to distinguish between phonemes that do not meaningfully contrast in their linguisti
by readymade 12y ago
It's been well documented that around 8-10 months, infants lose the ability to distinguish between phonemes that do not meaningfully contrast in their linguistic environment. An English speaker can certainly hear the tones, and may even be able to pick out different tones in isolation, but it takes significant training to be able to interpret them as contrastive as opposed to inflectional, etc.
- Tomte 12y agoIt drives me mad with Swedish. Some of those fricatives... I definitely hear something else than my (Swedish) teacher. I actually put together an MP3 with sounds from Swedish pop songs and told her "look it all sounds like German 'sch', not like 'ch'". She disagreed. There's no question, it is definitely more 'ch'...