Speech Perception

When we read that ‘infants can discriminate among most of the distinctions that are found in languages around the world, even those that they do not hear in the language used around them,' we may think that language teaching and learning is not a big issue. The same text - in Oates, J. (ed.) The Foundations of Child Development (1994) - continues: ‘Babies seem to come into the world with an ability to discriminate sounds, particularly speech sounds, that is in some ways even more acute than that of adults.' This means that it is easy for them to learn any language.

Learning a new language later in life are adults as good as babies? Research suggests that as infants grow up in a particular language community, they seem to lose their ability to discriminate among most of the distinctions that are found in languages around the world. As they get older they are exposed to just a small sample of these distinctions and later in life they can recognize only those distinctions that are used in their own language community.

It may well be that learning a new language as adults requires both developing language skills and the development of metalinguistic ability. Metalinguistic ability is the ability to think about and reflect on language itself. Calling our metalinguistc ability into action involves more than our ability to produce sounds that are recognizable parts of a language.

So, to consider whether it is possible for English speakers as adults to learn Turkish, the following information from the article on ‘Turkish language' in Wikipedia (the free encyclopedia on the internet) may be helpful:

Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language spoken natively in Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece and other countries of the former Ottoman Empire, as well as by several million emigrants in the European Union. The number of native speakers is uncertain, primarily due to a lack of minority language data from Turkey. The figure of 60 million used here assumes that Turkish is the mother tongue of 80% of the Turkish population, with Kurdish making up most of the remainder. However, the vast majority of the linguistic minorities in Turkey are bilingual, speaking Turkish as a second language.

There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and other Oghuz languages such as Azeri, Turkmen, and Qashqai. If these are counted together as "Turkish", the number of native speakers is 100 million, and the total number including second-language speakers is around 125 million.

Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Gagauz, and Khorasani Turkish in addition to Osmanli Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Oghuz languages, themselves a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which many linguists believe to be a part of an Altaic language family.

Like Finnish and Hungarian, Turkish has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. The basic word order is Subject Object Verb.

(to be continued)