In the two chapters that we read this week I thought that the phonotactics portion of chapter three was interesting because I had never heard of it before. I knew that as a native English speaker I had acquired many of these rules (such as the no word starting with the /ng/ sound rule), but I never really thought about how I know if a word is correct or not because I just knew it instinctively. Somehow this made me remember a show I had seen many years ago called "Ripley's Believe it or Not". On this show they had the world's fastest speaking woman (according to the Guinness Book of World Records) who had the ability to recognize chunks of words/phrases together instead of each word separately. This allowed her to speak them much faster, especially after she eliminated the pauses between words. To me it sounded like gibberish but after they slowed it down on a computer you could tell that she was in fact speaking each word (although she had no pauses). Even though this had little to do with phonotactics I looked up a video of her online (her name is Fran Capo) and found that it had a lot to do with linguistics so I wanted to share the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM6zPikfOEs
This video had more to do with the tongue twisters portion of the chapter because since Fran's brain has the ability to deal with many patterns at once she is able to speak much faster without too much distortion of her pronunciation. The only problem here of course is that at her top speed no one but a computer can understand her. I'm curious as to whether or not this is the similar skill that many poets, musicians, and rappers possess since they are able to speak more rapidly or in a more patterned way than we do in normal speech. I assume their skill has something to do with this ability to recognize and produce complex language patterns but maybe there is something else that is going on as well?
I am wondering about the importance of producing tongue twister. As many language teachers try it on their students but I never could make sense to use of it. I always find it disturb more to produce the word as there are similar repeated sound words. Tongue twister is even difficult for the native speaker then how come, it could be helpful for the non native speaker.
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