Every inch of my eight-year-old frame froze. I clasped my
lips together and squeezed even tighter into my “criss-cross applesauce”
cross-legged sitting position, trying to hide my anticipation. This was the
moment my elementary school principal announced the second-grade recipient of
the McNeil Elementary Horseshoe Award – the award given to the best student in
each grade, and the most prestigious award I’ve ever had the pleasure of
leaving out of my resume. My second-grade self wanted it more than an infinite
supply of happy meal toys.
The school principal raised the microphone to his lips, savoring the attentive silence of
the 500 wide-eyed children in front of him. I shut my eyes and inhaled the cold
tension of the cafeteria turned auditorium. “This year’s second grade winner…
from Ms. Rushing’s class… IS DYLAN NUG-EYE-IN!” The crowd broke out in polite
adolescent applause, and I stood up to begin the long trek to the stage to
accept my award. This was far from the glory I hoped for though; rather, it was
perhaps the first moment where I truly questioned the purpose of my existence.
My principal, the most important person in the room, butchered his attempt to
pronounce my last name and I, the second most important person in the room for
the next 60 seconds, realized that this man knew nothing about me other than
what was on the cue card he held in his hands. My moment of prepubescent
victory turned into an awkward handshake and a silent shrug.
My last
name is Nguyen. The way I explain how to pronounce it is usually rather simple:
It’s like win, but you attach the “ng” from singer to the beginning. The “ng” sound is the velar nasal ŋ, a sound never found in initial position in
the English language. The Linguistic term for this restriction is Phonotactic
constraint. As a result, most non-Vietnamese speakers find it very difficult to
pronounce, and none I’ve met have found it intuitive. Although my anecdote
above may suggest otherwise, I’ve never been offended when someone
mispronounced my name and I have no problem repeating or explaining it. My name
has, however, constantly reminded me the difficulty of learning foreign sounds.
According
to the critical period hypothesis, there is a point at which language acquisition
becomes increasingly difficult. Although the veracity of a critical period is
under debate in Linguistics, there is significant evidence for a critical
period for the learning of phonemes; research has shown that after about 5
years old, most individuals cannot accurately differentiate or produce phonemes
other than those in their native language. What’s interesting about the velar
nasal ŋ – the sound in my name that people can rarely pronounce - is that it’s
a phoneme commonly used in the English language; the difficulty arises because
it’s at the beginning of my name, rather than the end. “Can you pronounce that
again? I’m having trouble hearing the n-g part” is a question I expect of a
phoneme that doesn’t exist in the
English language. My understanding of the critical period of phoneme learning
doesn’t explain why moving a phoneme to a position it usually does not occupy
leads to the same effects as introducing a completely foreign phoneme.
This
seems to fall somewhere the inability to pronounce phonemes and the difficulty
of learning a new language, and one possible explanation could be that there is
a critical period for learning Phonotactic Constraints. There have been many
instances where trying to explain the pronunciation of my last name was like
trying to teach a dog to talk – it was just impossible. I’m confident this is
indicative of a larger Linguistic pattern in language acquisition, and it
certainly pushes me towards believing that the critical period hypothesis is
true.
I've always found the argument "I'm too old to learn a new language" self-defeating. First off, no scientific consensus has been reached that age impairs one's ability to learn a language. As we can imagine, it's virtually impossible to isolate an adult's learning ability and compare that to the ability of a child. An adult has so much more to worry about, which gets in the way of his motivation to learn.
ReplyDeleteSecond, there are social factors that encourage or discourage one to adopt sounds of a new language. I just watched a documentary on American soldiers stationed in Vietnam during the war (Last Days of Vietnam). Many soldiers had been there for years and married Vietnamese women. They spoke fluent Vietnamese because there is a social need to. Whereas for your principal, there isn't any need to learn the phonetics of Vietnamese.
This is a really interesting question. If the same phoneme exists in both english and Vietnamese then it doesn't make a lot of sense that English speakers would not be able to pronounce it in certain contexts. However, the contexts in which it appears in your name is different than the context that it appears in English. As we've learned in class, the environment of a phoneme can determine which allophone of that phoneme is pronounced. Phonemes are more of an abstract concept while allophones are the more concrete sounds that people make. Perhaps, some allophones of the velar nasal exist in English but not all of the same allophones of the velar nasal that exist in Vietnamese.
ReplyDeleteMy question that comes from this that I also think is worth considering is what happens when the opposite of this situation occurs? What happens when an individual learns a native language, then enters a new culture where they have to learn a new language after the age of 5, and cease to speak their native language for whatever reason? Does the process reverse itself? Does it stay the same? Are people only able to understanding and comprehend allophones from their native language? Or can they learn them in a new language that they speak after abandoning their first language?
ReplyDeleteI dont know the answers to these questions, but my inclination is that language learning is like any other process that occurs in the brain and is based on how often it is used. Synapses in the brain fires and then certain neural pathways get used more than others and those that are used become more developed and those that are not used can cease to exist. Given this hypothesis I believe the critical period hypothesis might have some truth but needs to be amended to explain for circumstances that fall outside of its specific tenants.
There is very strong evidence showing that a native speaker of Japanese ceases to distinguish different liquids within the first 30 months of his/her life, so learning sounds naturally can be more difficult for an adult than for an infant, which is why native speakers speak almost perfectly.
ReplyDeleteBut learning a language consists of many parts. For the syntax part, children acquire the syntactic rules by osmosis effectively, a process similar to that of first language acquisition, whereas adults usually learn these rules in an explicit and formal way. Note that if we do not use the appropriate teaching method when teaching different groups of learners, teaching becomes much less efficient.
On the other hand, interestingly, learning the phonology of a particular language formally can often be a lot more difficult than learning the syntax of that language. Probably for that reason, pronunciation is usually not taught formally. Basically language teachers usually just repeat a particular many times and ask students to imitate it. A somewhat rough analogy in learning syntax may be to teach, say, different categories of plural nouns in Latin without telling the students explicitly what rules govern their seemingly irregular morphology. So in fact learning some linguistics can (somewhat) help you learn languages with unfamiliar sounds!
I really admire the insights of your post. The critical period hypothesis clearly resonates. What alarms me, however, is that the critical period hypothesis needn't exist if our educational system made basic linguistics required learning in middle and/or high school. "Ng" should not be difficult to pronounce. As you mentioned, native English speakers pronounce it daily, just not in the beginning of a word. If we must learn grammar, spelling and writing in school it makes perfect sense that basic linguistics, the visceral aspect of language, should be taught as well. As the world becomes smaller and more multicultural, certain sounds should not be left to guess work. Linguistics provides us with the tools. Now is the time to put them to use. Congrats on the award by the way :)
ReplyDeleteI agree with a lot of what has been previously mentioned. Learning phonology formally in elementary or high school was not a thing. We had a lot of students in my high school with the last name Nguyen, and I always had difficulty pronouncing it. I think it is a mixture of not learning it in school but also, we are accustomed to using certain sounds in particular environments. It's not only about whether we always use it at the beginning or end of a word but also the surrounding sounds. When I first tried to produce the -ng sound found in singer, I had so much trouble trying to say it without producing the [i] sound as well. I agree with above comments about how learning about linguistics equips you with tools that you can then apply to a range of things.
ReplyDeleteAnother really interesting blog post! I agree with both of the last two comments. The discussion reminded me of a really interesting Time Magazine article I read a while back, entitled How the Brain Benefits from Being Bilingual
ReplyDelete(http://science.time.com/2013/07/18/how-the-brain-benefits-from-being-bilingual/). The article discusses how as early as nine months after we are born, some of our language learning synapses are pruned away, but that language learning ability is still very strong well into grammar school years. Moreover, as the article points out, studies suggest significant benefits to knowing multiple languages. Some studies show for example, that bilingual people appear to be mentally quicker, better at dealing with ambiguities, more able to resolve conflict, and are even more resistant to Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. These two features of bi-linguality point to the importance of prioritizing language learning (including phonology/linguistics) instruction for young children as several people have suggested.
This post is very interesting, as are the comments. As several people have mentioned, I think it might be valuable to have some sort of formalized instruction in schools of basic linguistic concepts such as pronunciation of the various sounds included in the IPA. But at the same time I don’t know if this would truly eliminate the problem Dylan mentions. First, it would be difficult to teach the pronunciation of every possible phoneme in every possible context. And, second, with no practical applications for the sounds they learned (and with no means of practicing them on a daily basis), students would likely find it difficult to absorb and remember all the phonemes they were taught.
ReplyDelete