Properties that Make Learning Language Difficult

One part of Kenstowicz’s article that I was drawn to was his discussion of how “native speakers often judge sounds to be identical that are clearly distinct phonetically - sometimes quite radically so.” He discusses how “in many dialects of American English the coronal stop [t] has as many as eight distinct pronunciations.” He gave examples of the eight different pronunciations: “stem, ten, strip, atom, panty, hit, bottle, pants.” Kenstowicz calls these variants the product of systematic rules, but he says that “we are in general unconscious of these rules.” This is something that I never really thought of before, and I was intrigued by this discussion. English speakers such as myself assume that one sound such as [t] would be just that: one sound. However, Kenstowicz goes so far as to say that people who don't recognize the differences between these rules and sounds do not sound like English speakers. He states, “if we come into contact with a speaker who fails to follow them [the rules of these sounds], we may feel that he or she is not ‘one of us’ and speaks with an accent or somehow sounds ‘funny.’ 

I also enjoyed Kenstowicz’s discussion of “collective phonetic illusions” because it gave me insights into language learning. By “collective phonetic illusions” he means “we hear things that are objectively not there, we fail to notice elements that are present, and we judge sounds to be identical that are demonstrably quite different.” This phenomena would understandably make learning English quite difficult. For example, Kenstowicz demonstrates that while tents has five sounds, “phonetic instrumentation” shows that in fact there is no consonant between the [n] and the [s]. He goes on to say that “the same gap is found in tends, yet we feel that the two words are somehow still different.” 

For a learner of English listening to tents and tends, it must be very difficult to distinguish the two. Kenstowicz states, “thus, in order to speak English, we must learn the rule that omits the [t] and [d] in tents and tends.” There must be many such rules in English. While we may typically think the difficulty of learning English lies in its grammar or spellings, the “unconscious phonetic illusions” add an extra layer of difficulty. In my own learning of Chinese, I have not yet reached the point where I have become aware of “collective phonetic illusions” but as I become more advanced I will probably encounter them. 

In the Gussenhoven article, I was intrigued by the section on Pitch because it talked about tone languages, one of which is Mandarin, which I am currently studying. I was not aware that “the number of times the vocal folds open and close per second determines the frequency of vibration” and concurrently “variations in the frequency of vibration are heard by the listener as variations in pitch: the more frequently the vocal folds open and close, the higher the pitch.” So when I create tones for Chinese words, I am varying the number of times my vocal folds are opening and closing per second. I had a question about this statement that he made: “In other languages, called tone languages, different pitch patterns are used in the same way vowels and consonants are used in all languages, i.e., to distinguish words from one another.” Does he mean simply that tone in tone languages is like spelling (“vowels and consonants”) in non-tone languages?