Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
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.
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I think it would depend on how old the infant is. If it is old enough to have "learned" that the difference between RA and LA is meaningful than it would hear them as different sounds, if it had learned that they were functionally equivalent then it would hear them as the same sound. If it had not been exposed to language at all and thus hadn't learned anything it would hear a difference.
Of course, what "learned" and "meaningful" mean in this context is a moot point.