The main thing that comes to mind when you think of learning a new language is usually vocabulary. The hundreds and hundreds of words that need to be learnt before you can hold a conversation. Even the simplest of chats requires knowledge of dozens and dozens of them. However, there is another more fundamental aspect that forms the basis of a language- the sounds themselves. I taught pronunciation at the English department of the University of Graz for two years. It wasn’t the accent in general that we focussed on but rather the specific sounds. And the first thing that I taught was not how to produce the sounds but how to hear the difference between them, how to identify which sound was which. For a lot of the students, being able to hear the difference between d and t, p and b or j and ch took a lot of time and practice. And I’m having exactly the same difficulty at the moment, trying to learn Arabic. But just why is hearing and distinguishing sounds in a foreign language so hard?
I recently stumbled across a fascinating TED talk by Patricia Kuhl, called The linguistic genius of babies, filmed in October 2010. She researches early language and brain development and, in this video, she talks about her research into how babies learn sounds. She explains that babies are constantly taking statistics on the sounds of the language that they are listening to, working out which are most important. Patricia Kuhl talks about an experiment done with Japanese and American babies, where she tests their reaction to different sounds. At the age of 6-8 months babies can discriminate between all sounds, whatever their linguistic background. Two months later they can’t do this anymore; at the age of 10-12 months there is a big difference in ability between the babies. The Japanese babies, for example, are now a lot worse at distinguishing between the /r/ and /l/ sounds because this difference just isn’t important for the language that they are learning.
The research also looks into whether being exposed to television is an equally effective way of learning language as learning with another person is. The answer is a resounding no. The babies only exposed to a language via a TV screen don’t improve in their ability to distinguish sounds at all. Learning language is something social.
I can imagine that this social aspect continues into adulthood too, even though we’re no longer as good at the statistic taking. It is far easier to learn a language when you live in the country, talk to friends in that language, experience life in the language, than when you’re sat at home trying to learn from text books. And surely the statistic taking continues too – it’s just a lot slower and needs a lot more concentration. Because eventually every single one of my pronunciation students got there – and hopefully I will too!
If you’d like to see the talk in full, just follow this link:
http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies
lingua allure 