From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 7739
Date: 2001-06-25
----- Original Message -----From: tgpedersen@...Sent: Monday, June 25, 2001 4:00 PMSubject: [tied] Re: uvular R--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>> ... In Polish, the normative pronunciation is [r] (an apical trill), but as elsewhere, there are individual speakers (including Yours Truly) who use other souns instead. Brain damage (including effects of heavy-metal poisoning) may of course be one reason why
the "wrong" "r" occurs, but speech defects due to such damage would presumably affect other apicals as well. The phonemes /s/ and /z/ can be regarded as diagnostic in this regard (Polish, like Sanskrit, has three rows of sibilants and their articulatory discrimination requires fairly effective tongue-tip control). However, kids with perfectly normal brains always find [r] a difficult sound and many substitute [l] or [j] for it until they are four or five years old; it's often the last phoneme in the inventory that they learn to pronounce correctly (or the only one that they fail to master).[Torsten:] > Hm. I think this means that you're saying:
> 1) apical /r/ is no harder to pronounce than /s/ and /z/, therefore uvular /r/ alone is no indicator of brain damage.
> 2) apical /r/ is the last phoneme Polish children learn (hence presumably the hardest to learn).
> Difficult to reconcile. So I would tend to believe that you agree with me after all (that it is possible to have solely a damaged /r/ as a result of a damaged brain).Not quite. Trilled [r] is of course a lot harder to learn than some acceptable realisation of /s/ or /z/. My point is that a person with even slightly impaired tongue-tip control would be extremely likely to have problems with the articulatory discrimination of the three series of Polish sibilants (spelt <s>, <sz> and <s'>; foreigners often find it the hardest chapter of Polish phonetics). It is the _system of contrasts_, not the individual sounds, which is difficult. Children learn to produce the correct distinctions -- that is, fully acquire the system -- about the same age that they master trilled [r]. Even in a child of six or seven any residual problems are usually treated as developmental, which indeed usually proves to be the case. Needless to say, there are also older kids and grown-up people with this sibilant problem, and many of them can't trrrill their rrr's either. The diagnosis may be anything: brain damage (congenital or acquired), partial paralysis of the tongue, or (sometimes) unconscious imitation of the wrong speech model by a perfectly healthy individual.
Piotr