Native listening: Language experience and the recognition of spoken words

What the user of a language hears – what hits their tympanum routinely – is almost always an uninterrupted stream of speech sounds, confoundingly interlaced with a cacophony of background noises; what they listen to, while engaged in, say, a casual conversation with an interlocutor, is determined by the particular language he or she speaks (call it their ‘native language’) and/or the one they are most at home with. That is the central message that this book has to offer.

But, someone might demur, that's all old hat! Doesn't even a sophomore who has had only a few lessons in Introduction to Phonology already know that the phonological structure of one's mother-tongue acts as a kind of sifter or sieve that retains most of the unfamiliar sounds one hears as simply extraneous noises and lets through only those that fit into one or another phonemic matrix that forms part of that rigorously hermetic structure?

In one sense, what the book tells us is nothing earth-shakingly new. Nor does its author claim to have anything of the sort to offer the reader. As she puts it herself in the Preface to the volume:

The central thread through the entire book … is the issue that has occupied me since I came into psycholinguistics – namely, what is universal and what is language-specific in the way we listen to spoken language. (xiii)

And she goes on:

This central thread delivered the book's title: listening to speech is a process of native listening because so much of it is exquisitely tailored to the requirements of the native language. The subtitle conveys the additional message that the story effectively stops at the point where listeners recognize words. (xiii)

Well, the story might stop there alright, but the full implications thereof only just begin to unfold. Thus, on page 33, Cutler herself gives us an idea of what else to expect: “[…] the makeup of phonemic inventories determines what vocabularies are like, which in turn determines what listeners have to learn.” (italics added)

This last point naturally prompts the question: What would life be like if we had only one language? An entire sub-section of Chapter 1 (1.6.2) is devoted to answering this question. But the answer provided, along with the way the matter is dealt with, is a bit of a disappointment. The concluding lines that say

So, life might in many ways be simpler if we all spoke the same language. But for the psycholinguist, life would be harder, because the window onto language processing provided by cross-language comparison would be blocked. (36)

are unlikely to satisfy the reader and might even strike him/her as an attempt to skirt the issue, rather than face it head-on. Besides, it is somewhat like lamenting that it is a shame that many languages are dying and disappearing from the face of Mother Earth because, if things go on at this rate, we linguists will have fewer sources for gathering raw data, our vocational staple.

The book under the spotlight is organized in 12 chapters. The opening chapter surveys the scenario and pleads for a crosslinguistic approach. The role of structure as key to getting a handle on the phenomenon of listening is emphasized and exhaustively discussed in Chapters 2 through 6. The next 4 chapters, in the author's own words, “enrich the story with further indispensable detail” (xiv). Chapters 11 and 12 look at what the author calls the “flexibility of speech processing”, thanks to which “[a]daptability and generalization are key elements of human cognition.” (407). (more on this to follow)

The book is a testimony to the nearly half century of giant strides made by scholars in the field of psycholinguistics. Cutler admits at the very outset that her life-history is inextricably enmeshed in the trajectory of the field of research, giving a personal touch to her work. The target audience, by the author's own admission, is composed of graduate students and the book contains what she “would like young researchers to know as they survey the field in search of a productive area to work on” (xiv).

The book does provide a panoramic view of the field, giving the reader state-of-the-art appraisal of specific issues and an idea of possible research avenues. True to its stated objectives, it also succeeds in persuading the reader that the topics discussed are worth further probing. Equally praiseworthy is the manner in which Cutler breaks down complex themes and makes them accessible to the average graduate student who is not necessarily familiar with the subject. The examples are legion. I would single out, for instance, the author's dexterity in explaining how listeners have at their disposal an impressively large range of cues when it comes to segmenting continuous speech.

There are occasions where the more demanding reader would wish that the author had furnished them with some supporting evidence (statistical or even anecdotal) or more sustained reasoning to prop up claims made as though they were too obvious to require any additional comment. A case in point is the following remark made right at the outset of Chapter 11:

Native listeners excel in adapting rapidly to newly encountered talkers, to dialectal variation, to unfamiliar accents, to new words, and to language change. (375)

The question is: Do they? Even assuming, for the sake of the argument, that it is true, how do we know for sure it is? Is there any hard evidence to prove that? And, even more importantly, what if we turn that question around and ask: Are the native speakers the easiest for listeners to comprehend, given that there should be no additional problem of ‘adaptation’?

Personally, my own gut feeling and some anecdotal evidence available in the literature would seem to suggest that the above corollary does not hold at all. In the specific case of English, Smith and Rafiqzad (1979: 79) have gone on record with the surprising finding that “the native speaker was always found to be among the least intelligible speakers.” This seems to go against the grain of what Cutler so confidently claims as self-evident:

No user of a second language needs to be told that it is harder to listen to and understand speech in the second language than in the first. (303)

On 385, one reads:

We also adapt to foreign accents in our L1. We perceive the difference from a standard very rapidly …

This complicates matters further by inviting questions such as: Who are the referents of ‘we’ here? Are all native speakers of a given language being contemplated here? If so, how can it be taken for granted that they all have a common ‘standard’ from which deviations can be readily identified as such? Could it not be the case that, even amongst a group of randomly selected native speakers, one person's standard may turn out to be another person's deviant behavior or mispronunciation? Note that Cutler herself implicitly gives us to understand that even native speakers can occasionally mispronounce words, as when she says

… native listeners are not very sensitive to single-feature mispronunciations …. Exactly the same is true in foreign language perception … (385)

On a purely hypothetical level, the reasoning would proceed somewhat along the following lines. A non-native accent is more readily accessible to another non-native speaker because, unlike that of the native, their capacity to distinguish words from one another is not fully dependent on the principle of ‘categorical perception’ or ‘the detection of minimal differences’. That is to say, many of these speakers have to make do with rough-and-ready contrasts, often the result of their having learned the oppositions haphazardly and in a piecemeal fashion. Also, many are more familiar with the written language than its spoken counterpart, leading to what is referred to as ‘spelling pronunciation’. Small wonder, then, they are able to handle deviations from the norm – even egregious ones at that (the ones that usually stump the natives!) – better in virtue of the fact that they can work their way backward to a possible written representation and thus figure out what is going on.

But probably the issue of non-native listening was not on the author's radar screen, because her focus is on native speakers and their knowledge of L1, as the very title of her book proclaims. Thus, in her concluding chapter, one reads: “The view of native listening that emerges from the evidence summarized in this book is one characterized by optimal efficiency” (447).

However, though such a self-imposed restriction of the scope may explain the author's lack of interest in going beyond the native mind-set, it does not fully justify such a stance. For the fact of the matter is that the native vs. non-native opposition is itself increasingly getting blurred as multilingualism grows by leaps and bounds right across the world, already accounting for more than half the world's population.

Particularly worth mentioning in this context is so-called ‘societal multilingualism’ where the different languages that make up the multilingual speaker's linguistic repertoire forms a complex and intricate mosaic – a fact noted by Emeneau as early as the 1950s and described by him as the “diffusion of linguistic traits across genetic boundaries” (Emeneau 1956: 3). This trend has only picked up momentum of late, as freshly released statistics from the US seem to suggest (Fenstermacher 2013).

The remarks made in the foregoing paragraphs do not constitute a major criticism of the book nor detract from its merits. Far from it. Cutler's treatment of her topic is very thoroughgoing and elegantly executed. There can no doubt whatsoever that it can be of immense help to those who want to make up their mind in respect of initiating a PhD project in the field of psycholinguistics. This book would give them much more than the decisive fillip they need.

KANAVILLIL RAJAGOPALAN

Department of Linguistics, Institute of Language Studies, State University at Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil

© 2015, Kanavillil Rajagopalan