How Do We Communicate?: Language in the Brain, Mouth and the Hands [July 8, 2013]
Chapter 2. Phonology: A System of Sounds [00:15:53]
So, phonology. Phonology is the system of sounds that languages have. There's a subset. There's a list, a finite list, of possible sounds that language can use. I'm going to put aside for the moment the question of sign languages and how they work. I'm going to talk about them in a little bit. The idea is that English has about forty of these phonemes. So, if you're a native monolingual speaker of English you hear speech and each sound you hear is categorized as falling into one of those forty morphemes — sorry, phonemes. So, for example, English has a phoneme of "lu," "l," and a phoneme of "r." And so, an English speaker can hear the difference between "lip" and "rip" and that corresponds to two different words in English. Other languages don't have that distinction and so those distinctions are very difficult for non-native English speakers to learn.
So, part of what goes on when you learn, is you have to learn the language — the phonemes that your language has. Another part of the problem of learning language is you have to figure out what the boundaries are between the words. You have to use sound signals to figure out the boundaries between the words. Now that — If the only language you've ever heard is English, that's going to seem like a really weird example of a problem because you're listening to me speak and in between each of my words you're hearing a pause. You don't have to be very smart to figure out where one word begins and one word ends. But the pause is a psychological illusion. If you were to just talk into an oscilloscope that measured your sound vibrations, there are no pauses between the words. Rather, the pauses are inserted by your mind as you already know where one word begins and another one ends. And you