Your speaking influences your hearing (fwd)

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Your speaking influences your hearing
http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?rep=2&aid=339669&ssid=364&sid=ENV

London, Dec 03: A new study by neuroscientists at the San Diego, US, has
revealed that what a person speaks has the possibility of influencing
what he might hear.

According to the study, people perceive different patterns in the same
sound sequences depending on their native tongue. People`s preference
for longer or shorter notes at the beginning of a musical phrase
apparently depends on their native tongue.

This might be the reason why the short, first note of “Greensleeves” may
sound naturally elegant to those who sing the tune, but might sound
awkward to the ear of a native Japanese speaker.

For their study, Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San
Diego, California, US, and colleagues recruited a group of 100
volunteers, half of whom were American and the other half Japanese.

The volunteers were made to listen to sequences of alternating long and
short or loud and soft tones. Scientists already know that human
hearing naturally group sounds together, but Patel and his team wanted
to know how people from different cultures grouped non-identical
sounds.

According to New Scientist, when Japanese participants heard the tones,
many of them grouped them in reverse order, with the shorter tones at
the end of each sound pairing.

Patel believes this difference might result from the fact that, in
Japanese, shorter words – such as articles and prepositions – tend to
come at the end of a phrase, while in English, these short words tend
to come at the beginning.

Also previous studies by Patel have suggested that a composer’s native
language influences how they write music. The findings were presented
at a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the
Acoustical Society of Japan in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Bureau Report