Re: easy sounds

Christian Thalmann wrote:

> Babies start out as perfect listeners, and have
> to learn to ignore non-phonemic differences between individual
> people's pronunciations in order to understand language.
I don't know if it is scientific or not, but I always had feeling that there
is a kind of remapping mechanism in our brains, that makes adjustments to
individual accents, both in native language and in foreign one. That is why,
e.g., I find difficult to follow YAEPTs when you talk about phoneMic
oppositions in your dialects: something inside me makes me to ignore the
difference between PR [bI@], GA [bIr\] and Tristan's [bI:]. I'm not even
sure if I can hear the difference unless this is said by the same person! So
I understand what Gary says about "mouth noises".
Btw, it doesn't work well for me in my L1, Russian. Standard language has a
very high social prestige here, therefore funny accents always bite one's
ears.

-- Yitzik