Language+Acquisition

By time humans have reached adulthood, they have learned to attend to certain language-related sounds and to generally ignore those linguistic features that are not common to speakers native tongue. Some sounds are filtered and ignored as they are irrelevant or meaningless. Humans also lose the ability to hear various sounds because of actual physical changes, such as deafness.

Initially, at birth and continuing throughout life there is a much broader range of generalized auditory sensitivity. It is this generalized sensitivity that enables children to rapidly and more efficiently learn a foreign tongue, a capacity that decreases as they age.

Nevertheless, since much of what is heard is irrelevant and is not employed in the language the child is exposed to, the neurons involved in mediating their perception either drop out and die from disuse, which further restricts the range of sensitivity.

Via this fine tuning process, only those phonemes essential to one's native tongue are attended to. Ex: in some cultures certain English words, such as pet and bet, sound exactly alike

Language differs not only in regard to the number of phonemes, but the number which are devoted to vowels vs consonants and so on. Some Arabic dialects have 28 consonants and 6 vowels. By contrast, the English language consists of 45 phonemes which include 21 consonants, 9 vowels, 3 semivowels (y, w, r),4 stress, 4 pitches, 1 juncture (pauses between words) and 3 terminal contours which are used to end sentences.

It is from these 45 phonemes that all the sounds are derived which make up the infinity of utterances that comprise the English language. However, in learning to attend selectively to these 45 phonemes, as well as to specific consonants and vowels, required that the nervous system become fine tuned to perceiving them while ignoring others. In consequence, those cells which are unused.



These sensitivities are either enhanced or diminished during the course of the first few years of life so that those speech sounds which the child most commonly hears becomes accentuated and more greatly attended to such that a sharpening of distinctions occurs. The nervous system becomes fine tuned so that familiar language-like sounds become processed and ordered in the manner dictated by the nervous system; i.e., the universal grammatical rules common to all languages. By the time most people reach adulthood they have long learned to categorize most of their new experiences into the categories and channels that have been relied upon for decades. By fine tuning the auditory system so as to learn culturally significant sounds and so that language can be acquired occurs at a sacrifice - at the expense of one's natural awareness of their environment and its orchestra of symphonic sounds.