🚀 go-pugleaf

In <31srr2$eij@ipied.tu.ac.th>, gwyn@ipied.tu.ac.th (Gwyn Williams) writes:
>James Walker (walkerj@torolab4.vnet.ibm.com) wrote:
>
>> William Labov's new book ("Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 1")
>> contains an interesting and very a propos anecdote by David de Camp
>> (pp.369-70).  [...]  his data suggested 
>> that speakers produced a distinction that they couldn't perceive, which
>> went against his supervisor's basic assumptions about the symmetry of
>> production and perception.  He only managed to get it passed by hedging
>> the controversial point and toning it down with disclaimers.
>
> Is this perception>production really that cast in stone? I can get my 
>Thai students in English Phonetics and Phonology producing /ch/ /sh/ 
>beautifully, but am damned if I can get them to hear the difference ....
I don't know how "cast in stone" it is, but it was a fundamental assumption
in all the linguistics courses I took that there was no difference in elicitation
between what the speaker could produce and what contrasts s/he could
perceive (although that assumption was sorely tested in a field methods
course I took).  Also, de Camp's dissertation was written ca. 1951.

Labov puts it better:  "It is generally assumed in linguistic analysis, and
often formally acknowledged, that grammars and phonologies should
be neutral with regard to the perspective of speaker and hearer.  It is
argued that we are all listeners as we speak, and speakers as we listen.
From the phonological viewpoint, this means that a map of instrumental
measurements of phoneme production should show the same structure
as the output of a categorization or discrimination experiment." (p.352)

James
--------------------------------------------------------------
James Walker, Information Development, IBM Canada, Toronto
"...it seems that your fiends always laugh in syllables, and always in
three syllables, never more or less, which is a remarkable property
in such gentry, and one worthy of remembrance."  -- Charles Dickens
The opinions in this post are mine, all mine, not those of IBM.