Do We Only Hear What We Want to Hear?
This week, we read “On Alternating Sounds” by Dr. Franz Boas. This article spoke about the interesting phenomenon which has been termed “sound blindness.” Studies show that a substantial amount of people cannot distinguish differences in the key and timbre of sounds which are easily recognized by ordinary ears. Studies were done on children, because there are more unfamiliar words which children have never heard before than those which adults have not. The children would write down their spellings of the words, and their writings would be studied. Miss Sara E. Wiltse made the discovery that children have a harder time grasping the sequence of sounds in longer words. The children tended to fill in the blanks with other sounds similar to the ones vocalized. For example, the children understood the “f” sound in the word “fan” as: kL, s, th surd, and th sonant. They also misheard the entire “fan” word as the following words: clams, ram, and fang, as well as fell. I think that an easier definition of “sound blindness” is just subconsciously blocking out sounds unfamiliar in that particular order and filling them with more familiar sounds. Boas wrote about a “test to attempt to ascertain whether individuals speaking [different] languages with “alternating sounds” hear sounds of our language as alternating sounds.” His study showed that they do. He found that a Tlingit alternately pronounced the English “l” sound as the exploded “l” sound and northwest coast “y” sound. In high school, I took 4 years of Spanish with 2 years of honors. I even placed into level 4 out of 5 here at the University of Illinois. Yet on a Spanish quiz during my freshman year of high school, I distinctively remember misspelling the word “gracias”. Can you believe it? Not to mention that my mom was born in Mexico, is Mexican, and speaks fluent Spanish, so this was, by far, not an unfamiliar word to me. Yet, never having to spell the word before, I wrote “gracias” as “glacias”. Switching the “gr” sound to a “gl” sound. Although the word “gracias” was not fully unknown by me, it was not as familiarized in my brain as the commonly used English words already embedded in my memory as my first language. This shows that sounds are not perceived by the hearer in the way in which they have been pronounced by the speaker.
On September 13th, 2016, the The Max Planck Society, which is an independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes, website published the article titled: “Sound of words is no coincidence: Particular sounds are preferred or avoided in non-related languages far more often than previously assumed.” This article wrote about a study in which a team of researchers, including scientists from Germany, the USA, Denmark and other countries, investigated the associations between sound and meaning in words. The scientists used data for the study from over two-thirds of the 6,000-plus languages spoken throughout the world. This international team also looked for possible reasons why some sounds are chosen more often for a particular term than others; yet, they were unable to find a concrete reason for associations between sounds and meanings with their data. They did, however, conclude that, “certain sounds for a particular meaning can easily spread from one language to another if this combination is generally perceived as being suitable and pleasant.” I found this concept both intriguing and related to Boas’s concept of using sounds that are familiar; yet instead of using sounds that are “only” familiar, people use sounds that are also more “pleasant”. This article also stated that, “It appears that people associate many terms with the same sounds, irrespective of whether their languages are related to each other or not.” Further explaining how regardless of the language, some sounds may be universally pleasant and possibly used more often, or in place of other unfamiliar sounds, than others. I recall that I kept going back and forth between “GRacias” and “GLasias” on that freshman year Spanish quiz. I finally decided that “GLasias” was the better, more pleasant sounding of the two. In this case, I was familiar with the word “gracias”; yet I went with, what I thought was, the more pleasant sound/spelling.
