This article touches upone one of the base feelings I have about language, its interpretation, and understanding of it. At the base of it, children can understanding meaning based upon the intonation of the words being spoken. Whether or not you are scolded in Japanese, English, or Swahili, we all know that we are being scolded. The words and distinctions of what specific sounds are relevant to the speech is something that is developed through hearing the mother tongue.
The article discusses a specific study when two children, one learning English, the other learning Dutch, are presented with two objects. They assign names to these objects and these names have a difference in how long the vowel is enunciated. Such as bat and baaaat. The English speaking children make no distinction between the objects (they think they're both bats) while the Dutch speaking children do, and that's because in that language, words such as bat and baaaat have different meanings.
What I find perplexing though is that certain language speakers end up being unable to distinguish certain sounds after they reach a certain age. As provided in the article, Japanese speakers have a hard time distinguishing l's and r's. My question is, why do they lose this capability? Does the brain lose a certain level of malleability after a certain threshold? Can this threshold ever be reversed? If yes or no, why?
In conclusion, there are a lot of questions that have yet to be answered in the world of psychology. Different universities that speak different languages are performing different test, and coming up with different conclusions. How we interpret these conclusions will make this field fascinating for decades to come.
Original Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071001172817.htm
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Psychologists have in fact made a lot of progress on the issue of why babies are able to distinguish all possible syllables while native speakers of one language have problems distinguishing certain phonemes from another language! However, to date there are still competing hypotheses. One possibility is that, as you suggest, babies brains are “more malleable” than adults, and that there is a “critical period” during which a baby can learn any language, but that after this period the brain becomes less malleable and distinguishing foreign phonemes becomes impossible or at least very very difficult. Another possibility is that it is the act of learning the native language phonemes that makes it difficult to distinguish foreign syllables later. That is, the apparent loss of malleability is actually caused by the networks in the brain responsible for representing phonetic distinctions become tuned or biased to distinguishing native language sounds. What kinds of evidence might you collect that would help tease these hypotheses apart (this is a VERY hard question, which researchers are still struggling to come up with!)? See Autumn’s recent blog post for some more thoughts on this matter!
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