We have all heard those jokes about Chinese people mixing up L and R sounds while speaking English. What causes this? Is it related to the vocals of Chinese language and the way they speak their own language?
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So this is actually really interesting. When you’re a baby, all the spoken sounds you hear are kind of just noise. They also exist on what is essentially a spectrum of noises. L and R aren’t just two distinct sounds, they’re a whole array of lots of different, very similar sounds that continuously flows from sounding like an L on one end to sounding like an R on the other end, kind of like the spectrum you get on a colour chart between blue and yellow, that passes through blue-greens, greens and yellow-greens. Over time as a baby is exposed to language, it learns to start distinguishing different sections of this continuous sound spectrum. Its brain starts categorising sounds into groups – picking a chunk of the spectrum and labelling every sound within that chunk “B” for example. From that point on, every time the brain hears any of the sounds in that chunk, it identifies the sound as “the B sound” before sending the signal on to the language processing part of the brain. That bit doesn’t get the unedited audio, rather, it gets what is basically a transcript of the audio that’s been compressed down into simpler, lower resolution bits that convey less detailed information, to make figuring out the words faster and easier.
Where exactly the brain decides to place these chunks depends on the language the baby is exposed to and the sounds it uses. Different languages will create different chunks in the baby. These chunks are usually reasonably similar between languages – for example, pretty much every language has a “T” sound, and that sound chunk usually covers pretty much the same band of sounds. There is a degree of variation, however. For example, quite a few languages don’t put a chunk boundary between B and P sounds, but just create one large chunk that is both B and P, which makes B and P sound the same to the brain. This is what happens with L and R in the brains of people whose native language is East Asian (At least for Chinese and Japanese anyway, not sure about the rest). An English brain has two chunks, one for L and one for R, but a Chinese brain only has one much bigger chunk for both L *and* R. It averages those sounds out, so both an L sound and an R sound will be interpreted as the same sound in the brain. Basically, Chinese people can’t *hear* the difference between L and R. There are some techniques to kind of get around this, but they’re usually unreliable and a bit shit. Tangentially, this is also why learning how to pronounce certain languages can be really hard for English speakers – we can’t actually hear the difference between certain sounds, so we can’t tell whether we’ve said it correctly or not.
Also, this is why, if you listen to one of these languages enough, you start being able to notice the same speaker seemingly saying both L sounds *and* R sounds pretty interchangeably. The natural flow of speech means that you don’t always hit the exact perfect spot when you say a syllable. You don’t usually notice cos your brain categorises the mistake as the same sound anyway, but in these languages, the syllable’s natural position is often *really* close to what would be the boundary to an English listener, which means when it slips it can often slip over the boundary, causing the English brain to categorise a *slight* difference in actual sound as a *completely* different sound, because it happened to cross over the boundary between rounding up and rounding down. To use a maths comparison – 1.49 and 1.51 are very nearly the same number, but if you’re rounding to the nearest whole number, your calculations are going to interpret this as a difference of an entire 1, rather than the 0.02 it actually is.
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