MANILA, Philippines?Some researchers argue that language has universal rules followed everywhere, regardless of what tongue/s the natives actually speak. One such rule is called sonority. This basically says that people prefer to put letters and sounds together to create something that rolls easily off the tongue and not something that might be interpreted as a coughing or choking fit. Paired consonants like ?bl,? for example, are easier to say than a pair like ?lb.?
To prove that language has universal rules, a team of researchers from the United States and South Korea teamed up to study how native Korean speakers responded to English words they heard. Psychologist Iris Berent from Florida Atlantic University was the lead author of the report, which appeared in the April 8 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
2 experiments
Berent and her colleagues conducted two experiments using student volunteers from Gyeongsang National University in South Korea. Each volunteer listened to several dozen pairs of English words and answered the study questions based on what they heard. The researchers said they selected Korean participants because their language didn?t seem to use consonant pairs as often as English did. By comparing the different tongues, Berent and her colleagues hoped to determine if language rules were innate or else developed by speakers over time.
The tests involved word pairs that fell under one of four sets of consonant pairs, ranging in sonority from easy, like ?bl,? to medium, like ?bn,? to difficult, like ?lb.? In the first test, 19 volunteers listened to pairs of words and were asked if the words they heard sounded alike. For example, did they hear the words ?sport- sport? or ?sport - support??
In the second test, close to 50 participants listened to pairs of words and had to determine how many syllables they heard. Using the same example above to illustrate the difference, they were asked if they heard one syllable as in ?sport? or two syllables as in ?support.?
Complemented similar trials
The experiments Berent and her colleagues did complement similar trials involving native English speakers as reported in the journal Cognition last year. It turns out Berent was lead author of that study as well, and one of her co-authors from that paper also collaborated with her in the Korean project.
Comparing the results of the English and Korean speakers, Berent and her colleagues found that the data were similar for both groups.
?Despite little or no experience with initial consonant sequences in their language, Korean speakers demonstrate preferences? that converge with those of English speakers,? Berent and her colleagues wrote in the current study. ?This convergence is all the more remarkable in view of the linguistic differences between these languages.?
Positive responses
Regardless of their native tongue, the study participants had more positive responses toward the more sonorous consonant pairs used in the tests.
The results, they added, indicate that adult human brains somehow contain knowledge of universal language rules, even when some of these rules don?t apply to their own languages.
The study from Berent and her colleagues lends credence to the theory that language rules are innate, not learned, but the researchers caution that they?ve only been able to study ?a handful of languages? so far.
?The hypothesis that speakers possess universal phonological constraints does not imply that knowledge of those constraints is experience-independent nor does it speak to its species-specificity and evolutionary origins,? they noted in their study. ?How speakers of different languages converge on the same universal knowledge remains to be seen.?
(E-mail the author at massie@massie.com.)
