“

Gretchen: When you’re born, you pay attention to any sound that could be relevant for any of the world’s languages. Then by the time you hit the age of, like, three months or six months or nine months, depending on the sound pairs, you lose that ability, and you retain the ability only to perceive the sounds that are relevant for the languages that you’re exposed to.

Lauren: That’s so early! It constantly astounds me how early this happens.

Gretchen: And so when you try to talk about these sound contrasts that people aren’t used to hearing the difference between, when you introduce it Intro Linguistics classes, people almost don’t believe they’re real. Because we’ve spent almost our entire lives getting used to paying attention to only a particular set of sounds. It’s kind of like optical illusions. 

Lauren: It’s like growing up and only being told that the picture of the duck that rotates as a rabbit is a duck, and you’re like, “This is only a duck,” and you can only see it as a duck.

Gretchen: And then linguistics is like “Actually, there’s also a rabbit there” and you’re like “What?”

Lauren: You need to train yourself to be able to see the rabbit again. Or in this case, to perceive the differences between sound pairs you’ve been ignoring since a few months after you were born.