tailieunhanh - Ebook The word Brain 2015: Phần 2

The words put into your brain are more diverse than the words coming out of it. You have only one life to tell – your own – while your co-humans make you listen to hundreds of different lives in different places and in different circumstances. | Speaking 49 5 Speaking The day you utter your first words in a new language is not always a happy day. Most languages have unfamiliar sounds and to reproduce them faithfully takes time sometimes years. If you have more than one new sound in a single word the probability to get it right approaches zero. Take the one-second sequence P h J ựj - good morning pronounce SabaH el-khair . In a single second you are supposed to produce three sounds that are totally unfamiliar to most people from Western Europe. The odds are against you. Let s return to your childhood again. How did you circumnavigate the obstacles that visibly impede fluent speech in adults From what we saw in the Listening chapter part of the solution was to postpone speech and to just listen to the sounds of the world. It took approximately 5 to 7 months before you started to babble and utter meaningless sounds such as ba-baba-ba-ba ka-bu-ba-da-mi and only when you reached the age of 12 months were you ready to experiment with real words and two-word sentences generally in order to express desire More juice Want cookie . You took your time before wrapping your baby thoughts in chunks of language. Print 50 The Word Brain Anatomy and physiology conspired. They made it easier to let sounds come into your brain than to let them out. To let human speech in all you need is an eardrum three tiny bones in your middle ear and the so-called cochlea. These structures amplify the sounds and transduce them to electrical signals for the brain where speech segmentation and interpretation immediately ensue. This is a straightforward process and apart from your ears and your brain nothing else is involved. In comparison speaking requires sophisticated mechanics. To proclaim the resolutions of your brain to the world you have to co-ordinate dozens of muscles in your larynx pharynx neck cheeks mouth and tongue. Putting all these pieces into the perfect position in a minimum amount of time is a remarkable .