[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play [was: EmergentBehaviorsspawnedfrom...]

[ghovs]

Ilia Malkovitch wrote:

> This is way off topic, and a completely non-scientific question,
> but:

> Does this mean that if you (somehow artificially) managed to
> submerge a baby in an environment that contained "all" phonemes
> (or at least the majority of the phonemes from around the world),
> then this person would have a significantly easier time learning
> foreign languages and hearing nuances within them?

In the spirit nonscientific speech, I'll add on a little anecdotal
evidence.

I was personally brought up in an environment without much regard
for ethnic barriers. I've always been shown that all those different
people aren't scary, and often can be very interesting to understand
and communicate with.

This includes much experience with varying degrees of proficiency in
secondary languages (mostly english -- but not always). Once you
start recognizing what mistakes certain first languages cause, you
start to wonder what that first language is really like. And you
start being able to work with very broken grammar, too.

Most of those people's native languages were of the two large west
european language families, and consequently those are languages I
can at the very least piece together with some effort.

This same ability is completely absent when the language in question
isn't at all related to german or latin, since I barely notice word
breaks or sentence breaks. I'm quite confident that I can still
learn a language beyond that scope (because I have...) but the
process takes more time, and effort, suggesting that a helpful
predisposition is only there for the two language families I
mentioned.

I'm not saying it's all perfect and I can pretend to be a native
speaker from a faraway province in each language, but I definitely
can communicate, which is my goal all along.

> This isn't a very well-formed question.  But the concept of having
> no cortical pathways that recognize certain nuances in sound which
> are completely apparent to a speaker from a different culture is
> very intriguing.  Is there any interesting reading or research
> someone from this list could recommend on the topic?

You can be aware, but you have to listen closely. It's like
reading. When you read words, your eyes look at the size and shape
of a word, and only when you don't recognize it will you start
reading the letters themselves. In fact, it's such a fuzzy process
that you can throw in the proper letters in a random order without
making much of an impact on legibility. Once you add, swap out or
remove letters, though, it breaks down and you have to go letter by
letter again (hence why mispeled text is so annoying -- takes more
effort to read).

The problem with sound is that most humans are not outfitted with a
quick replay function, AND once they start speaking slowly and
clearly, the sound is far different from normal speaking tone, so it
only really gives hints about normal speech, not the complete
guide. Once you get a feel for the pattern of stress, omission and
tempo, you can distill from the proper pretty word how it zooms past
in a sentence, but before then you will stay lost when they resume
speaking normally to you. Most of this pattern is (thankfully)
handled subconsciously, but you still need a bit of practice to make
sense of it.

Communication goes by pattern recognition, which is faster and less
burdensome on the mind than by tracing each pattern in detail, but
it requires both sides of the communication to have the full
patterns on file first. This also explains why people who don't have
much of a gift for language will often use a word they do know to
substitute a word they don't. Their subconscious simply tells them
some idiot mispronounced a simple common word, and what they really
meant. Not that this is always correct, nor does the subconscious
always inform about the mispronounciation happening at all.


Perhaps we need Amanda's +5 footnoter here, since I do know I read
much of the above from people with an actual degree in linguistics,
but who, where, when ... ?

rgds, Peter de Freitas
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