Yep, I can hear the difference between pero y perro, but a consistent
production of the double r eludes me as yet.
I persist in believing that I can learn to make and to hear new sounds.
One of my latest realizations is that it helps if you imitate the
facial expressions that accompany the making of the sounds. Needless
to say, make sure the show you're watching wasn't dubbed into spanish
from german.
-- rec --
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 1:09 PM, Nicholas Thompson
<nickthomp...@earthlink.net <mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>> wrote:
Roger,
I was taught in graduate school that the ability to make and hear
phomenes of all language is inborn, but as you learn a language,
you lose the ones you don't need, and after about age six, it's
hard (or impossible?) to get them back. I also heard that there
was some language school in Boston that goes at that problem head
on and gets back those phonemes for you. But this is the sort of
stuff you probably know more about than I do so I won't say more.
I am trying to sing German and Italian right now and both require
a trilled "r". I simply cannot do it. The closest I can manage
is singing the German r as a "d", which is close enough for
gummint work, but very unsatisfying. I also can't blow a proper
raspberry. Never have been.
If you run into somebody in Santa Fe that recovers lost phonemes
for old people, let me know.
Nick
*From:*friam-boun...@redfish.com
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>
[mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>] *On Behalf Of *Roger Critchlow
*Sent:* Monday, February 13, 2012 12:04 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] FW: Re: Friam Digest, Vol 104, Issue 9
I was torturing myself yesterday listening to Spanish
instructional material in my car. The tapes spent a lot of time
presenting minimal contrasts between vowels in different contexts,
between consonants, or between alternative stresses. I can hear
some of the contrasts quite clearly, I can hear others if I listen
carefully, but there are some where my auditory system just goes
"what?". I'm hoping that reviewing the tapes with the text in
front of me will help, or that I was just getting tired. I
suspect that someone with a differently accented american English
upbringing might have trouble with a different subset of the
contrasts.
I think there's a parallel between all of this and
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/error-correcting-codes-0210.html.
The decoding of linguistic communication is an omnivorous error
correcting algorithm which operates in situations with
unpredictable noise. It will use anything associated with the
communication act to aid a decoding, but it usually gets by with
the simplest and most straightforward coding. And it decodes all
the alternate code words, as it were, in parallel.
So we're happy to decode scrambled words, as long as the word
length and letter distributions are correct and the scrambled
words make a sensible utterance. Why not? We're perceiving word
lengths and letter distributions all the time when we read.
Similarly, but harder to demonstrate in a typed email, my
calligraphy teacher once showed us that a line of text can be read
from only the tops of the letters. The bottoms aren't nearly as
informative.
-- rec --
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu
<mailto:desm...@santafe.edu>> wrote:
Eric, hi,
There is a (to me) fun similarity between this sequence you have
illustrated, and some pathologies and treatments in rapid auditory
processing, in which the workers I know are April Benasich and
Paula Tallal (this, from a few years ago).
The stopped phonemes, particularly the voiced, non-plosives (in
English, b, d, g) differ by transients that are on the order of
<<100ms in duration. A subset of children are born with deficits
that render them unable to resolve transients this short in the
primary auditory cortex (I don't know or remember what the right
reference is to the brain region or layer). As a result, they
can't hear difference between /bag/ and /gag/, and they grow up
with severe dyslexia through having never had needed queues to the
structure of the language.
The human vocal tract can't alter these stops, because they are
mechanically determined, so there is nothing the caregiver can do.
What the remedy is, is electronically altered speech, which can
slow the transient down while retaining the structure of the
formant timeseries that distinguishes the segments, so that it
spans more than 100ms, while leaving the rest of the word length
and overall speech prosody the same. The child is played a few
hours of this altered speech per day, through the early formative
few years (I forget, perhaps pre-9-month to 3 years). The child
develops near-normal language and reading skills, and the
altered-speech therapy can be phased out. After that, the child
functions essentially normally. In sentence context, he believes
he is hearing the distinction between /bad/ and /dad/, and
processes sentences normally, though in fact this rapid-auditory
deficit is congenital and never develops normal function.
However, there is so much redundancy built into the combination
of phonology, lexicon, morphology, and syntax, that it can serve
many functions over the course of lifetime language use, from
child learning, to error correction in normal speech, as in noisy
environments, or correcting for speaker accent variants. Our
colleague Morten Christiansen even has evidence that phonotactic
queues provide significant evidence to distinguish word categories
such as noun and verb in English, which child language-learners
are using, along with morphological queues.
Somehow, all this works, because there is a complicated mix of
top-down conditioning of fine-scale perceptual processing, updated
by bottom-up updating from the actual rapid inputs.
I have assumed that things like this are also going on for written
language, and I have also assumed (though in this case without
defense from neuroscience), that this is an expression of a
general feature of the multi-level character of neural processing,
which can also be seen in the function of systems such as reflex
arcs, which, e.g., require different responses for reaching to
touch, versus to grasp, even though they use the same afferent and
efferent systems, and are conditioned by a reflex arc rather than
going all the way back up to tactile/motor cortex interactions.
I don't know whether this addresses the kind of explanations you
think would be relevant or appropriate to phenomena such as this.
All best,
Eric
On Feb 13, 2012, at 7:28 AM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:
Benny,
The first quote is the only one I think is from me. To clarify:
When you say that the phenomenon is "reading gibberish", then
it seems like it might be a skill. However, if you phrase it
as a failure to distinguish gibberish from properly written
words, or as mistaking gibberish for properly written words,
then it seems less impressive. Let's set up a hypothetical
longitudinal study...
At age two you show your child two words "amazing" and
"azanmig" and verbally ask them which one is the word
"amazing". The child guesses at a 50/50 rate, and from that we
conclude that the child in unskilled. Later, at age 4, the
same test is given, and carefully sounding out the words, the
child identifies the correct word every time. This, we
conclude, demonstrates growing reading skills. Next, lets say,
thirty years later, we send the child an email, in which, in
the middle of a sentence, there is a claim about the azanmig
powers of the human mind. Our (adult) child reads the sentence
without even noticing that there is a mistake. Why would the
failure to perform at the level of a 4-year-old be suddenly
taken as a sign of advanced sophistication?
Surely there is some way to argue that the final incident
indicates an advanced skill of some sort, but our initial bias
should be to assume that failures to discriminate indicates a
lack of skill.
Is that more clear?
Eric
On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 06:15 PM, *Benny Lichtner
<benjamin_licht...@brown.edu
<mailto:benjamin_licht...@brown.edu>>* wrote:
Hi, all. Just want to respond to some of these points as I am
very interested in meaning making.
It [the ability to read "gibberish"] does not demonstrate
mysterious skill, it demonstrates a (perhaps mysterious)
lack of skill. The real mystery, if there is one, is why a
person so well trained in reading would be fooled by such
a simple manipulation.
I do not see where the "lack of skill" is. Could you
elaborate? What skill is it that we lack because of our
ability to read "gibberish"? Is it the skill of identifying
what is "gibberish" and what is not? The problem with
"gibberish" is that you always have to put scare-quotes around
it.
I have to ask why even an intelligent person can make some
kind of sense out of ["]Gibberish.["] Something about our
brains seems to Beg for Sense when there is none.
I suspect that were our brains not to "beg for sense," we
would never be able to read any non-"gibberish." There are no
/hard/ rules for generating meaning, just some customs we use,
and are used to, and break much of the time.
We prefer magical explanations because they do not require
any effort.
Is it that we "prefer" magical explanations, or just that they
are the first to come to mind, and are perfectly satisfactory
explanations at that, so why look for others? If the audience
were simultaneously presented with a magical and a non-magical
explanation, I am not sure which would be preferred. It might
have nothing to do with magicality. Maybe more to do with
creativity, or realism, depending on who you are.
All Physicists are apparently insane because they
intentionally look for difficult explanations.
The explanations that physicists look for are difficult by
coincidence, I think. They look for explanations that fit
their assumptions about knowledge and causality, and those
explanations happen to be difficult, both to invent/discover
and to understand.
Apparently Cryptic equals Important for most people.
I wonder if this has something to do with the reward that
comes from understanding something challenging. Cryptic
(wo)man-made things may also seem important because it is
mysterious why a (wo)man would spend time creating something
cryptic.
--Benny Lichtner
Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
