The Acquisition of Speech Sounds
A new article in Science Daily reveals that toddlers are grasping language skills much earlier than expected, and “by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning.”
Apparently the wee tykes are also able to discern which sounds to ignore – those, for example, that don’t play a significant role in speaking their native tongue. If you’ve ever wondered why you have so much trouble rolling your ‘r’s, this is why – the most important period for acquiring the speech patterns and sounds of one’s native language is during a child’s first year. Sounds that don’t factor largely into the language a child is hearing – in our case, the rolled ‘r’ – are categorically ignored, causing our tongue and brain to develop accordingly.
This is why Japanese toddlers, like Japanese adults, cannot tell apart the English “r” and “l” sounds and why English speakers have trouble with certain French vowels because they all sound the same to non-native speakers due to language learning in infancy. The Penn study shows that even when two words sound very different, toddlers know whether to take this difference seriously or to chalk it up to random variation depending on how their language works.
So while linguists are finding that learning a new language as an adult isn’t as impossible as previously believed, your accent could be there forever.
Read the complete article: here
