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I'm a native speaker who used to commute to work by train every day but have been living in Japan for 3 years (rural area, no other English speakers in my town)
by hysan 12y ago
I'm a native speaker who used to commute to work by train every day but have been living in Japan for 3 years (rural area, no other English speakers in my town). I was a bit curious because after hearing the phrase, I could only hear the resemblance and not the full phrase. So I did an experiment.
I replayed it a second time to try and remember the sounds. Then I went and did some work for 2+ hours before coming back to HN. I played the clip and the sounds became gibberish again until I reheard the phrase.
I'm going to try this again tomorrow (if I remember), but my guess is that the ability to hear & unhear the sound is dependent on how much natural English is used around you. The less it is used around you, the less your brain is actively trying to match sounds to an English pattern. In my case, my brain is most likely trying to map sounds to Japanese rather than English because that is all I hear around me.
- BoppreH 12y agoIf the distortion algorithm was public (and simple) we could try on different languages and see if that's the case. It's still interesting, though.
- hysan 12y agoDid it again a day later and same result. Though I noticed that the more I replayed the clip, the easier it got for me to "hear" the phrase within the distorted clip.