A lot of different things factor into our perception of speech and language. For this post, I will be focusing on how each language has different rules for combining phonemes to create words, which is why it can be so difficult to pronounce words from unfamiliar languages. In addition, I will be focusing on how it is difficult to know where words begin and end when listening to native speakers and how visual information from the movement of the mouth when talking plays a role in what we hear.

I grew up speaking only English, but I picked up on Spanish later in life. By no means would I say I speak perfect Spanish, but I know enough to be able to handle myself in a Spanish speaking country. I can read Spanish, I can write in Spanish, I can speak Spanish (not perfectly with some of the more advanced grammatical concepts), and I can understand Spanish. However, I have always found the area that I struggled most to be understanding Spanish, specifically native Spanish speakers. Spanish and English have different rules for phonemes together because they are different languages. Since I didn’t grow up speaking Spanish, it was more difficult for me to understand these rules and is more difficult for me to understand native Spanish speakers. When native speakers rattle off sentences, I tend to get lost in what they are saying and find it difficult to pick up when one word ends and another begins. This could be because of the fact that I am not as familiar with the phonemic rules as native speakers would be and could also be a result of my lack of familiarity with different slang words and lingo. When native speakers slow down their speech for me, it is much easier to pick up on the different words they say, possibly because they are making an effort to annunciate and pronounce each word more clearly.

I also remember experiencing the effects of the role of visual information in processing speech first hand while taking different Spanish courses in school. We would have “listening” sections on exams where an audio recording was played and we had to answer questions about it based on what we heard. This was always the more difficult part of exams for me. The speakers didn’t speak too quickly, so I never understood why it was so difficult. Now I understand that it could be due to the lack of visual stimuli. I wasn’t able to watch the speaker’s mouth move while listening to them, so determining the context of what they were saying while being unable to see the mouth move made it much more difficult to grasp the conversation.