12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2017

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why does it always sound slightly off when someone tries to imitate your accent? Why do tiny children learning your second language already sound better than you, even though you’ve been learning it longer than they’ve been alive? What does it mean for there to be sounds you can’t hear? In Episode 12 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore the fundamental linguistic insight at the heart of all these questions: the phoneme. We also talk about how to bore babies (for science!), how sounds appear and disappear in a language, and how to retain our sense of wonder when the /t/ you hear doesn’t match up with the /t/ I hear. LIVESHOW: Exciting news! We held our first liveshow on Saturday, September 23rd in Montreal, at Argo Bookshop. It was great to meet so many lingthusiasts at this sold out show. We’re looking forward to bringing the liveshow experience to more people, once we hit our Patreon goal. This month’s Patreon bonus was about linguistic research, and how to become the go-to person among your friends for linguistics questions when you don’t have a university or a research budget, as nominated and voted on by our patrons. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about language games, hypercorrection, swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and explaining linguistics to employers by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm For the links mentioned in this episode, check out our shownotes page at: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/165591628291/lingthusiasm-episode-12-sounds-you-cant-hear

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthusiasm, podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:19.1	I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:20.3	And I'm Lauren
0:20.8	Gorn. And today we'll be talking about sounds that you can't hear. Phoniums. But first,
0:26.3	so much exciting news, interview and live show. So we reached our Patreon goal to start airing
0:34.8	interviews on Lengthusiasm, and we are really excited to bring you an interview
0:39.0	next month. Yay, I'm so excited that we met this goal. Thank you, as always, to all of our patrons
0:44.4	who support the show directly and allow us to keep building and growing and bringing in new
0:50.8	things, including interviews. So I got to talk to Nicole Holliday, who is an awesome linguist at the Institute this summer.
0:58.0	It was a really fun conversation.
1:00.0	I am so jealous. I cannot wait to listen.
1:03.0	And we're going to bring that to you next month. It was a really fun.
1:07.0	The other exciting news is that I'm going to be in Montreal in a couple of weeks. In fact,
1:12.4	about the time that this show goes out for a conference. And I just, I think I know someone who
1:19.1	lives in Montreal. I don't know who's that, Lauren. Oh, it's you. You live in Montreal.
1:24.2	Oh, hey, it's me. So this is completely unexpected and a delightful coincidence,
1:30.6	and we thought we can't pass up the opportunity while we're in the same place to not do some kind of
1:35.5	live show. Surprise, last minute live show in Montreal, late September. It's going to be at the
1:42.3	Argo Bookshop on St. Catherine Street. It's going to be at 8pm on
1:47.1	Saturday the 23rd of September. So stay tuned to our social media for all the details,
1:53.1	opportunity to register for the event. And if you're in Montreal, we look forward to seeing you
1:58.4	there. And there'll be some sort of snacks. We haven't figured out what kind of snacks there's going to be or what kind of drinks there's going to be, but there will be some sort of refreshments.
	...

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