The Convenience of Selective Ignorance

Anyone who learns an instrument goes through a period when they have a very clear idea of a sound which they find impossible to make. Interestingly, the gap between ambition and ability usually drops with proficiency. This is to say, the vast space of artistic ideas is transmuted into a more constrained, practical creativity. "Normal" musicians seem to find, once proficient, no need to expand their musical language-- the marginal gains of learning the "language" are higher than those of stylistic exploration.

In light of the Kenstowicz and Gussenhoven readings, I claim that a similar relationship holds in actual language: once a language has been learned, linguistic features which aren't utilized are conveniently ignored. Kenstowicz mentions the fact that in some American English dialects, there are  8 pronunciations of the coronal stop which are phonologically identical. English provides no motivation to tell each allophone apart, so its speakers simply don't perceive the difference. Gussenhoven describes tone languages like Dinka, wherein tone is a feature of a word; in English, word tone depends on context. It seems the journey from phonetic information to phonological information is one of distilled recognition, i.e. picking up on linguistically relevant details, but nothing else. I would guess that this make the brain's job easier, less resource-intensive, and less error-prone.

Gussenhoven details the great complexity in the interaction between the organs of speech, an intricate collaboration between the lung, larynx, vocal cords, velum, tongue, palate, uvula, and teeth, to name a few. Clearly, this system, as well as the auditory system and the nervous system, is very finely attuned to the specific problem of human language. It is not, however, attuned to specific human languages; e.g., no population developed supersonic hearing in order to communicate in 25kHz buzzes. Instead, the "evolution" of languages which noticeably takes place even within generations utilizes the aforementioned selective feature extraction mechanism, e.g. California English is California English because its speakers learn to be receptive to certain vocal features and ignore others.

I find this fascinating-- the same sound, to speakers of two different languages, will sound different to each because each is attuned to different features. Of all the steps that convert rapid fluctuations of air pressure into meaning, this selective acoustic feature extraction is perhaps the least obvious, but most fascinating.