Throughout lesson 11, it spoke of how we perceive words that are used in sentences and single words. I know that growing up in New Jersey, we tend to say some words differently as they would in other areas of the United States. An example of this is that I say “wudur” instead of pronouncing “water”. Im sure this seems weird to a lot of you reading this, but its very interesting how different people perceive different accents and dialects. I went to school in West Virginia for my freshman year, and it was a complete language culture shock. They would call their lollipops “suckers”, and they would put extra emphasis on a single letter in a word such as “hammer” would sound to me like “HAMM-er”. This to me was interesting because being from the east coast, I rarely heard speech like this, but to them it was perfectly normal and I was the one who spoke funny.
An example of how words sound different to many people was demonstrated by Irwin Pollack and J.M Pickett. They recorded conversations of participants who sat in a room, waiting for the experiment to begin. When the participants were then presented with recordings of single words taken out of their own speech, they only positively identified that word 50% of the time (Muchinsky p298). This is a perfect example of how people are able to identify words in conversation, but when those words are broken down into single words it then becomes more difficult. That is because the participant does not know the context of the conversation and thus the slanged or murmured word becomes almost unrecognizable. English is the sixth hardest language to acquire solely due to its evolution of slang. Teaching proper english is beneficial, but if a non english speaker was to begin a conversation with a native english speaker, they would not be able to carry a conversation. This is because we speak most of our words in a slang, that to us seems perfectly justifiable, but would confuse others.
From my personal history the biggest problem I had with understanding a foreign language was Comprehension. This is defined as the way people process language sounds, understand words and sentences expressed in writing and speech. I took honors level Italian throughout high school for three years, and if today you asked me to put a sentence together I would fail. This is sadly true because even though I learned definitions and meanings, I could never comprehend the sentence structure and thus was not able to produce linguistic sentences. I would have trouble with the Morphemes, which are defined as the smallest units of language that have a definable meaning or a grammatical function. An example would be the word “train”. Even though “train” consists of one syllable it has two morphemes, “truck’ and “s” (Muchinsky p298). For me learning a second language I could never positively use words such as train because I could no comprehend the past and present tense, along with the plural morphemes. The perception of words is hard to master no matter what language you speak or where you are from. From my past experience I can say that I still have much to learn about language from the West, and from other cultures. But the way we perceive words will never change, we need to understand how our brain processes this, and use it to our advantage.
Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition. Wadsworth, Inc.
http://www.lexiophiles.com/featured-articles/results-of-the-hardest-languages-to-learn-poll
Anthony Ferrono- Blog Post 3