I've always been somewhat conscious of phonemes. Not to the same degree, I'm sure, as someone who learned spoken English through speech therapy, but certainly more than hearing people.
I'd been a bit concerned about the phonology aspects of my linguistics class. For all my implant has made incredible improvements in my hearing, and for all my abilities to communicate regardless of whether I can distinguish a [t] from a [k], I still have a lot of trouble distinguishing phonemes in isolation. Particularly vowels. (Although to be fair, some of that is normal - distinguishing a schwa from another vowel is hard for anyone.) And there has been one assignment already that we've had to change, which was fine with the professor.
But today in recitation, it struck me that I have a very solid grasp of how phonemes fit into the bigger picture. Between growing up lip reading, the conversations I've had (professional and just curious) with my audiologists and the two speech therapists I've worked with, and my admittedly limited cued speech, I've been exposed to a lot of these things on an informal level. The McGurk Effect? Wait, you mean hearing people have a name for that? (Grandma Wentworth: Drama? They teach that?) (Seriously, that was the first time I noticed this. The confusion of my hearing classmates when they experienced it for the first time was hilarious.) The idea that people with what seems like the same accent actually have subtle dialectal differences, or that an individual will speak the same word with different phonemes at different times? No problem. Distinguishing method of production, and placement? Also easy - on paper, anyway. In running speech, well, that's a different story.
It actually reminds me quite a bit of my first cued speech class. The deaf/HOH population figured out the lip reading quickly. Those of us who'd acquired English the usual way had a bit of trouble with things like the /s/ /z/ distinction, but the others really didn't. The hearing population, on the other hand, had a hell of a time figuring out "this whole lip reading thing", and that was a major hangup they had to deal with before they could even start paying attention to the cues.
Y'all may be better at it than us in practice. But for exactly that reason, we've got you beat on a theoretical level. ;-)
I'd been a bit concerned about the phonology aspects of my linguistics class. For all my implant has made incredible improvements in my hearing, and for all my abilities to communicate regardless of whether I can distinguish a [t] from a [k], I still have a lot of trouble distinguishing phonemes in isolation. Particularly vowels. (Although to be fair, some of that is normal - distinguishing a schwa from another vowel is hard for anyone.) And there has been one assignment already that we've had to change, which was fine with the professor.
But today in recitation, it struck me that I have a very solid grasp of how phonemes fit into the bigger picture. Between growing up lip reading, the conversations I've had (professional and just curious) with my audiologists and the two speech therapists I've worked with, and my admittedly limited cued speech, I've been exposed to a lot of these things on an informal level. The McGurk Effect? Wait, you mean hearing people have a name for that? (Grandma Wentworth: Drama? They teach that?) (Seriously, that was the first time I noticed this. The confusion of my hearing classmates when they experienced it for the first time was hilarious.) The idea that people with what seems like the same accent actually have subtle dialectal differences, or that an individual will speak the same word with different phonemes at different times? No problem. Distinguishing method of production, and placement? Also easy - on paper, anyway. In running speech, well, that's a different story.
It actually reminds me quite a bit of my first cued speech class. The deaf/HOH population figured out the lip reading quickly. Those of us who'd acquired English the usual way had a bit of trouble with things like the /s/ /z/ distinction, but the others really didn't. The hearing population, on the other hand, had a hell of a time figuring out "this whole lip reading thing", and that was a major hangup they had to deal with before they could even start paying attention to the cues.
Y'all may be better at it than us in practice. But for exactly that reason, we've got you beat on a theoretical level. ;-)
posted by ismith at 12:49 AM
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