Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 May 31

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May 31

Can someone’s native language affect how they hear other languages?

Can the phonology and sound rules of someone’s native language affect how they hear other languages (or how their brain processes the sounds being heard)? For example, say a person whose native language is one that does not allow consonant clusters or syllables ending in consonants (and who is not greatly familiar with any other languages) listens to someone speaking a different language that lacks these rules. Would the listener hear the speaker as vowel-padding their syllables, thus making them more akin to the syllable structure of the listener’s own language, even if the speaker is not actually doing such? Primal Groudon (talk) 00:49, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

As a native English speaker, my first three years or so learning Chinese I had a lot of difficulty differentiating /i/ and /y/, let alone tones one and two. And I was a lot less deaf back then. So anecdotally yes. Folly Mox (talk) 00:54, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

McGurk effect

Whatever the language, all listeners rely on visual information to a degree in speech perception. But the McGurk effect's intensity differs across languages. Dutch,[37] English, Spanish, German, Italian and Turkish [38] language listeners experience a robust McGurk effect; Japanese and Chinese listeners, weaker.[39] Most research on the McGurk effect between languages has been between English and Japanese. A smaller McGurk effect occurs in Japanese listeners than English listeners.[37][40][41][42][43][44] The cultural practice of face avoidance in Japanese people may diminish the McGurk effect, as well as tone and syllabic structures of the language.[37] This could also be why Chinese listeners are less susceptible to visual cues, and similar to Japanese, produce a smaller effect than English listeners.[37] Studies also show that Japanese listeners do not show a developmental increase in visual influence after six, as English children do.[40][41] Japanese listeners identify incompatibility between visual and auditory stimuli better than English listeners.[37][41] This greater ability could relate to Japanese's lacking consonant clusters.[37][42] Regardless, listeners of all languages resort to visual stimuli when speech is unintelligible; the McGurk effect then applies to them equally.[37][42] The McGurk effect works with listeners of every tested language.[10]

--Error (talk) 01:25, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

Speakers of languages in which [ɑ] and [a] are effectively allophones (e.g. Turkish) may have a hard time hearing the distinction between, for example, Dutch man ("man") and maan ("moon"); they sound the same to them. Similarly, Russian lacks a voiced or voiceless glottal fricative, so Russian speakers, hearing one, tend to map it to their phoneme /x/. Consequently, they then hear the Dutch spoken word hoed ("hat") as if the speaker said goed ("good").

Children of expats who were exposed at a young age to another language than their mother's tongue, and then move back with their parents even before they start to speak, have been shown to have an easier time later in life learning that other language's phonemic system than people who did not have such exposure. Apparently, the neural net for mapping the sounds to phonemes was developed at a young age and, while unused, remained somewhat functional.  --Lambiam 07:13, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

My sister speaks some Dutch, and was told that when she tried to say "hale good" (standard reply to "how are you?") it came out as "yellow hat" – spoonerizing the ‹h› /h/ and ‹g› /x/. —Tamfang (talk) 20:31, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

It's hele goed vis-a-vis gele hoed, I believe. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:20, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

It's not entirely grammatical though. It should be heel goed and gele hoed, gele being the declined form of geel. Hele is the declined form of heel, but in this case it's an adverb, so not declined. Heel sounds more or less like English hale.

There's also the (probably apocryphal) story of the priest from West Flanders. In West Flemish, /ɣ/ is pronounced [ɦ] and /ɦ/ is dropped. The priest hypercorrected, talking about the geilige maagd (horny virgin) instead of heilige maagd (holy virgin). PiusImpavidus (talk) 12:12, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

For sure. The way the speaker of a given language hears a foreign language is reflected in the resulting "accent" associated with the native speaker's language. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:26, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

Perceptual narrowing#Phoneme distinction. Nardog (talk) 15:08, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

A possibly Norwegian woman taking refuge in a seaside town in eastern England during the second world war wanted eggs and carefully enunciated the word to the shopkeeper to ensure he would understand her, but it came out "eks" and he was bemused. I can say no more as I don't speak Norwegian. 2A00:23D0:492:6301:207B:B2D7:62D2:2142 (talk) 11:45, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

F.U.N.E.X? Alansplodge (talk) 16:57, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

I guess that in Swedish and Norwegian, for the combination of a short vowel and a voiced plosive, it might be unvoiced before s. Then, Scandinavian speakers might still be aware of the distinction in English. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:24, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

I once heard a slightly agitated Dutch traveler, about to disembark, tell a flight attendant that he wanted his rat back. It turned out, after some confusion, that he was looking for a red bag.  --Lambiam 14:57, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Or "ret back", more likely, but ret is not a common English word. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:24, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Actually more like "ret beck". In something along the lines of "I want my XXX beck", spoken by a furriner, a listener's initial inclination will be to interpret this by the replacement "beck" → "back", thereby coaxing the puzzled listener towards the replacement "ret" → "rat".  --Lambiam 20:27, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

I spent hours with a Portuguese friend who was telling me I say não with the wrong vowel. I'd say it exactly as she said it, then she'd say I was getting it wrong, and as explanation, she'd repeat it the same way again. Eventually she got tired, and said she was slippy.  Card Zero  (talk) 09:33, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Not just between languages but even between dialects. I have the Pin–pen merger and cannot reliable hear or say the difference in those two words in my own language. Rmhermen (talk) 14:21, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

@Card Zero: There was a forum comment yesterday "I did re-add Born Slippy to my Spotify playlist so some good has come from this interaction" [1]. I never heard the expression before. 92.25.129.245 (talk) 09:31, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Almost all dialects of Norwegian and most Swedish dialects have a distinction between two different pitch-accents or “tonems”. People having languages without such accents – including Norwegians and Swedes lacking them in their dialect – often tend to not be able to hear the difference unless being trained for it. --T*U (talk) 07:41, 4 June 2024 (UTC)