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From: lammens@sunybcs.uucp (Jo Lammens)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.cog-eng,sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Regional accents (was: Spelling and Perceptual Mode)
Keywords: GB Shaw, orthography
Message-ID: <5832@cs.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 12 May 89 17:00:16 GMT
References: <2763@puff.cs.wisc.edu> <60340@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <3193@tank.uchicago.edu>
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In article <3193@tank.uchicago.edu> goer@sophist.UUCP (Richard Goerwitz) writes:
>What's interesting to me is that, after just a night listening to
>this or that British dialect, an American can pretty much understand
>everything perfectly.  Actually, a night is being liberal.  In most
>cases the adjustment takes no more than a few minutes.  You kinda
>lock into their system.
>
>What is it that facilitates this kind of rapid adjustment?  When you
>look at the phonetics, the dialects are quite different.  I mean, if
>you transcribe a few lines using a broad phonetic notation system, you
>get something quite unlike any American dialect.

I suspect one quickly learns to map one's own phonological/phonetic
system into that of the person being listened to. The "phonetic mode
of perception" probably has something to do with that (although it is
a debated phenomenon): vowel and other sounds are separated into
classes with sharp class boundaries across an otherwise continuous
spectrum of sound change. So if you learn to place the class
boundaries at another arbitrary point, you suddenly "understand" what
someone is saying, although he may use a rather different sound
system. Of course there is more to it than just the spectral
composition of speech sounds, but the same probably holds mutatis
mutandis for things like temporal aspects (VOT, reductions, ...),
intonation patterns and the like. 

In fact there is no such thing as THE B.E. or A.E.  pronunciation, or
even THE pronunciation for any one dialect. If one acoustically
analyses people's pronunciation of the same words, the differences
tend to be very large even among speakers of the same dialect. Yet no
one really notices. That is one of the reasons that automatic speech
recognition is so difficult: the identification problem for phonemes
is a complex one, but you don't realize it until you start measuring
things or try to build a system that does it. We humans can easily
shift our perceptual category boundaries around without even being
conscious about it.

Jo Lammens

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