Re: The Ambiguity of "Noise" [WAS: Parallelism]

On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Ed Heil wrote:

> Therefore, the expected result would be that given three sound
> patterns, characteristic of [b], [@], and [d] in isolation, one could
> perceive the word [b@d].  But in fact, it was difficult to do so.
> Whereas, it was easy to recognize a word if the transitional pieces
> (which have no status at all in traditional phonology) were there but
> one of the phones was completely lost.
This might be because the transitional bits in fact give *two* bits
of information each: "b-to-@" and "@-to-d". Taken together, they're
more representative of the complete word than the "bald" phonemes.

Our eldest daughter is learning to read - as exciting for us,
interested parents, as the kids' early language acquisition. The
method she's using expects learners to pronounce single letters as
distinct phonemes: /p/ /e/ /n/, and only then construct the whole
word: /pen/ ("pen", obviously).

This causes as much confusion as it prevents - we think it might be
better to learn whole word patterns first (as I did when I learned to
read about 25 years ago) and only then analyze them into phonemes and
letters. The theory seems to be that you get to know "the bits that
words are made of" before you have to know the words and that makes
it easier to read unknown words. There may be something in it, but in
the first six months or so they're not supposed to see any unknown
words anyway (she has a book that she can read even now, using about
ten different words, and it still manages to make an interesting
story) and after that the analytic phase is well underway.

She does have some talent - when Boudewijn and I were talking about
centro-palatal stops last night, she followed Boudewijn's
instructions to me how to pronounce it and came up with the same
that I did - a centro-palatal affricate /c/.

   Irina

            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastinay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)