Phonetics

[ughaibu]

My wife is Japanese but she speaks english extremely well. On one occasion I said to her something about drosophila, and was surprised by her reply "what's grosophila?". My best attempt at an explanation of this involves two phonetic limitations, 1) in japanese there are no distinct sounds for the english 'l' and 'r', there's only an intermediary sound with the tongue slightly behind the upper teeth 2) in english there is no initial 'dl' sound and english speakers tend to hear this as 'gl', try offering your friend a dlass of wine.

Somewhat after this event I was informed by the discovery channel that a child aged six months can distinguish the full range of sounds in all human languages but loses this ability when aged around ten months. By coincidence, at that time, my eldest niece had a daughter aged about six months, so, my brother taught her to distinguish initials 'dl' from 'gl'. She is now aged two and a half, I'll try to get an update as to whether or not she can still distinguish these sounds.

[Qfwfq]

I read about that research years ago in the Scientific American. It's definitely part of the mechanism by which we learn the language of our community, the first step of course is to recognize the necessary sounds.