Path: utzoo!dciem!client1!mmt
From: mmt@client1.DRETOR.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Early Language Learning & Ancient Language
Message-ID: <3214@client1.DRETOR.UUCP>
Date: 28 May 90 21:44:12 GMT
References: <1990May25.142052.16989@athena.mit.edu> <7898@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Reply-To: mmt@client1.dciem.dnd.ca (Martin Taylor)
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 54


Greg Lee says:

If what you mean is that after having learned to ignore the l/r
difference in Japanese (as they must), it takes Japanese speakers a
while to distinguish l/r in a language like English which requires it,
that's true.  There's nothing surprising about that.  If you mean that
adult Japanese speakers cannot learn to distinguish l/r, given practice
(and motivation), that is just not true.  There is the possibility that
they do not distinguish the two in the same way as native English
speakers, once they have acquired the distinction.  The comparison
to cats raised in darkness is really absurd.

=============

It is interesting to notice that the English titles and abstracts of
Japanese-language journals often have the l-r confusion as a typographical
error.  Likewise, my psycholinguist wife, Korean born (where l and r are
supposed to be distinct) but English-speaking for nearly 30 years, makes
occasional l-r errors both in speech and in writing.  It isn't easy to
change your basic sound discriminations.

But it is possible.  One of the founders of modern psychoacoustics, Wilson
P. (Spike) Tanner, in the late 50s did an experiment to test his idea that
people could learn to discriminate anything for which there was a consistent
discriminatory feedback.  He devised a signal pair that no-one initially
could discriminate between, and asked subjects to make a forced-choice
discrimination (with correctness feedback after every trial) between them.
To begin with, everyone got 50% correct, and this went on for some time--
for one subject, for 40 days or more at (?) an hour a day of listening.
But eventually, everyone learned how to hear the difference between the
two signals.  Once the score went up a bit, to, say, 60%, it would very
quickly (within a day or two) go up to 100% correct discrimination.  So
people can learn to discriminate sounds that they initially claim to
be identical.

The situation with babies and the native language seems to be a bit different.
Up to the age of about 10 months, babies seem to be able to discriminate
sound pairs from just about any language, but after that they lose the
ability for discriminations not in their own language while they enhance
the ability for discriminations that are in their own language.  All the
same, adults *can* make the discriminations they seem to have lost, given
appropriate testing procedures.  What seems to happen is a drift into
"categorical perception" which might be described as "hearing" the label
for a sound rather than its acoustic pattern.

And no, I don't know what this is doing on comp.ai, except that there has
been a long string of speculation on the topic.

Ref: Psycholinguistics: Learning and Using Language, Taylor and Taylor,
Prentice-Hall, 1990, pp240-242. (Plug;-)
-- 
Martin Taylor (mmt@zorac.dciem.dnd.ca ...!uunet!dciem!mmt) (416) 635-2048
"Viola, the man in the room doesn't UNDERSTAND Chinese. Q.E.D."  (R. Kohout)