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Originally Posted by omk3
For anyone who doesn't know it yet, there is this really fun site http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to...tive-demo.html where you can enter any word or sentence and have native speakers of several languages pronounce it. It is actually a demo for a speech recognition software.
Unfortunately there's no Bulgarian choice, so I could not hear the тояга pronounced, though it sounds like a very useful word indeed!
I did listen to the Danish words though, and if the software works as it should, I am shocked and fascinated by "rødgrød med fløde" and whoever manages to pronounce it! Wow!
This made me remember an interesting study that I had watched in a documentary, and I managed to find a relevant article. Experiments have shown that as babies we can recognise all the little nuances in sound and differentiate between them. We lose however this ability very early on: As we are getting better and better in our native language's sounds, we start ignoring the rest.
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Have a read, it's really interesting stuff. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/39928_learn22.shtml |
Yes, I remember reading about this several years ago and found this fascinating. Among other things, it was interesting to note how researchers decided what babies recognized or not as something they have already heard. If I remember correctly, the idea is that when baby hears something new, he is happy (or maybe just excited, but maybe for baby that's the same thing). We know just how happy baby is because we have put a thing in his mouth that he sucks on. Depending on how happy he is, he sucks more or less (don't remember which).
So the experiment, as I understood it, goes like this:
Take a baby make him hear, for instance, the sound RA. It's new, baby is excited. Then repeat the sound untill baby gets bored.
Then change the sound to LA. If the baby is Japanese, to him RA and LA are the same sound, so he is still bored. If he is French, LA is a new sound, so he gets excited again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by omk3
So when two foreign words sound exactly the same to you, while a native speaker insists that they are totally different, you now know why. This doesn't explain why some people manage to have very convincing accents in foreign languages later in life, while others never can, though. A (musical) friend suggested once to me that it has to do something with having a musical ear, but I'm not sure. I'm rubbish at music, myself, but probably better than average in accents.
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I do think that hearing plays a big part. I am not especially interested in music but I can recognize notes well (for a musically illiterate person). I also have pretty good hearing, and I can hear languages more easily than some.
But I'm sure there are also other factors, both genetic and depending on the environment you grew up in.