Not "feeling" like losing an accent (dialect?)

[Alice Faber]

Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: Not "feeling" like losing an accent (dialect?)
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> On Oct 30, 2006, at 3:39 PM, Tom Zurinskas wrote to Beverly Flanigan:
>>
>> > ... My conjecture is that native USA English speakers that drop
>> > the sound "awe" and replace it with "ah" are exposed enough to the
>> > sound
>> > "awe" through TV and radio that they can say it if they want to but
>> > they
>> > don't want to.  As Krashen says in his conjecture, it doesn't feel
>> > right to
>> > them.  This is opposed to your conjecture that they actually
>> > physically
>> > "cannot say it"....
>>
>> krashen's conjectures are largely a red herring here.  and nobody's
>> conjecturing that people *physically* cannot produce certain sounds.
>> what's going on is something subtler: a *mental* barrier to producing
>> distinctions *in connected speech*.
>
> What's the difference.  If they cannot make a sound it's the physical
> apparatus cannot be made to say the sound.  What Bev said is "if they can't
> say it, they can't say it!  How many times do WE have to say this?"
> Perhaps
> you could point something out to her.
>
>> as far as i know, people who have leveled /a/ and /O/ in favor of /a/
>> can certainly learn to produce [O] -- indeed, a great many of them
>> have done so, in exclamations like "awww" or in imitations of the
>> pronunciations of single words in other dialects (like the new
>> yorker's "cawfee").  what is so difficult is integrating the
>> distinction into connected speech.
>
> I agree, Bev's statement aside.  Krashen would agree with you too.
>
>> the problem is that each of us has acquired an amazingly complex,
>> highly automatized, and intricately coordinated set of routines for
>> producing our dialect of our native language.  almost all of this is
>> not under conscious control, and it could not possibly be: even a
>> short utterance requires hundreds of gestures, in sequence or
>> overlapping with one another, performed on a time scale of
>> milliseconds to centiseconds.  (similar things are true of speech
>> perception.)
>
> If one is making "hundreds of gestures... in milliseconds" not under
> conscious control how does anyone know about them.  They're unconscious.
> This must be conjecture.

Actually, no. It's quite well-studied, as a matter of fact, and while
there are disagreements among scholars about details of method and
interpretation, there is none about the basic material. Start here:
<http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/002-2165698-9591244?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=articulatory+phonetics>
--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber
faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203)
865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203)
865-8963

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