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Posts tagged "phonemes"
“
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.
”—
Excerpt from Episode 12 of Lingthusiasm: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes (edited).
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about learning sounds linguistically.
Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 12 shownotes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics. I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne, and today we’ll be talking about sounds that you can’t hear.
Gretchen: Phonemes!
Lauren: But first, so much exciting news: interview and live show!
Gretchen: So we reached our Patreon goal to start airing interviews on Lingthusiasm, and we are really excited to bring you an interview next month.
Lauren: Yay! I’m so excited that we met this goal, thank you as always to all of our patrons who support the show directly and allow us to keep building and growing and bringing in new things, including interviews!
Gretchen: So I got to talk to Nicole Holliday, who is an awesome linguist, at the Institute this summer, it was a really fun conversation.
Lauren: I am sooo jealous, I cannot wait to listen.
Gretchen: And we’re going to bring that to you next month! It was really fun.
Lauren: The other exciting news is that I’m gonna be in Montreal in a couple of weeks. In fact, about the time that this show goes out, for a conference and I just – I think I know someone who lives in Montreal?
Gretchen: I don’t know, who’s that, Lauren?
Lauren: Oh, it’s you! You live in Montreal!
Gretchen: Oh hey, it’s me!
Lauren: So this is completely unexpected and a delightful coincidence, and we thought we can’t pass up the opportunity while we’re in the same place to not do some kind of live show.
Gretchen: Surprise last-minute live show in Montreal, late September, it’s going to be at the Argo Bookshop on St. Catherine Street, it’s gonna be at 8 p.m. on Saturday the 23rd of September.
Lauren: So stay tuned to our social media for all the details, the opportunity to register for the event, and if you’re in Montreal, we look forward to seeing you there!
Gretchen: And there’ll be some sort of snacks! We haven’t figured out what kind of snacks there’s gonna be or what kind of drinks there’s gonna be, but there will be some sort of refreshments. So, come for the refreshments, stay for the linguistics!
Lauren: And I’m gonna need heaps of space in my suitcase to bring back all the maple products, so I will bring Australian-themed confectionery. If you see me there and you’ve listened to this episode, tell me and I will give you Australian-themed chocolate.
Gretchen: Hey Lauren, I’ve listened to this episode! You should give me some Tim Tams!
Lauren: Maybe.
Gretchen: And also, this month’s Patreon bonus episode – I almost forgot in the excitement about all the other new stuff that’s coming up – is about linguistics research: what kinds we’d like to see more of, how to do some of your own, and all the ways to find out stuff when your friends ask you about linguistics.
Lauren: You can find a link to our Patreon in the show notes and links to all of our bonus episodes as well.
Gretchen: And go to Lingthusiasm.com or @Lingthusiasm on Twitter or Facebook for details about the live show.
[Music]
Gretchen: So, what do we mean by sounds you can’t hear? This idea that language influences our perception is a really popular one in pop linguistics, and the idea of there’s these words that you can’t totally understand, there’s untranslatable words – Danish has this word for a sense of cosiness that we just can’t understand in English – this type of concept is really popular in pop linguistics, but it generally shows up at the word level. So you get these lists of words that are like, oh, this is this feeling, or this is this social relationship that exists in this language that you just can’t understand in English, and yet the list of untranslatable words often include English translations right beside them, which I’ve always found kind of ironic because, “Oh, you can’t translate this except for this translation that you can see here.”
Lauren: There are some lovely examples of this, though. I think it’s worth acknowledging that they show really interesting cultural foci, so we’ll put some links to the World in Words podcast, they have a couple of great episodes on untranslatable words across cultures that are really lovely, and their whole show is generally lovely stories about language anyway, so we’ll pop that in the show notes. But you’re right, it’s often this, “We can’t translate it in exactly one word,” not that they’re completely untranslatable.
Lingthusiasm Episode 12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes
Why does it always sound slightly off when someone tries to imitate your accent? Why do tiny children learning your second language already sound better than you, even though you’ve been learning it longer than they’ve been alive? What does it mean for there to be sounds you can’t hear?
In Episode 12 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore the fundamental linguistic insight at the heart of all these questions: the phoneme. We also talk about how to bore babies (for science!), how sounds appear and disappear in a language, and how to retain our sense of wonder when the /t/ you hear doesn’t match up with the /t/ I hear.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
LIVESHOW: Exciting news! We held our first liveshow on Saturday, September 23rd in Montreal, at Argo Bookshop. It was great to meet so many lingthusiasts at this sold out show. We’re looking forward to bringing the liveshow experience to more people, once we hit our Patreon goal.
This month’s Patreon bonus was about linguistic research, and how to do it when you don’t have a university or a research budget, as nominated and voted on by our patrons. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about language games, hypercorrection, swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and explaining
linguistics to employers by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode and more about phonemes:
- Infants hear sounds their parents don’t
- High Amplitude Sucking and other infant research methods
- Untranslatable words on the World in Words podcast
- Which languages have distinction between /b/ & /p/, and /s/ & /z/ (WALS)
- Chinese/Canadian English children (All Things Linguistic)
- Chinese/Canadian English children (McGill)
- Korean/Dutch children
- Superman/Clark Kent analogy for phonemes
- Free tudoring and a moist owlet: the 5 /t/ sounds in English
- What early attempts to invent a reading machine taught us about speech sounds
- Why “Baltimore” and “Voldemort” sound almost identical in Spanish
- Heatmap of the most common phonemes in languages of the world
- A sentence containing all the phonemes of the English language
- LING 101-style videos about phonemes: short, medium, long
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire Gawne, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
About Lingthusiasm
A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.
Weird and deep conversations about the hidden language patterns that you didn't realize you were already making.
New episodes (free!) the third Thursday of the month.
