Exploring the Symphony of Sounds in Language

Peter Ladefoged is in love with what you say.

Not the meaning of your words.

But the eloquent music you make when you speak.

The 73-year-old UCLA linguist has spent a lifetime gathering all the distinct sounds of the world’s languages, from the jungles of New Guinea, the bush of Africa, and the mountains of Tibet and Nepal.

To hear the genial professor honk, click, choke, whistle, smack, rumble and burble is to hear every instrument in the orchestra of human speech. For instance, there are 83 ways to begin a word with a click.

“You can make more sounds than you can use in a language,” Ladefoged said. “Not all sounds are robust enough to make words. You balance what sound is easiest to make and what is easiest to hear.”

When a language is lost, its phonetic melody disappears as well. Thousands of languages all over the world will not be spoken by anyone in another generation or two, several experts said. Many of them eventually will exist only as tape recordings and field notes in Ladefoged’s black filing cabinets.

Sound shades the meaning of speech, from a question’s rising inflection or the clipped tones of command to the outcry of alarm.

In all, there are an estimated 200 vowel sounds and 600 consonants that can be played on the harmonium of the human voice. But no single language makes use of more than a few dozen. English uses just 40 contrasting sounds to construct more than half a million words.

Infants, however, start out able to distinguish between all the possible sounds of all human languages. Almost immediately, the infant brain begins to adjust itself to the characteristic sounds of its native language, under the influence of parental speech patterns.

Neurons in the auditory cortex quickly reorganize themselves to suppress nonnative sounds by the time an infant is about 20 months old, according to Patricia Kuhl and her colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Among those who hear English, the researchers discovered, the neurons that respond to the sound “ra” position themselves well away from the cells that respond to “la.”

But among those children exposed to Japanese, those neurons are intertwined, meaning the speaker would have trouble distinguishing between the two sounds.

Indeed, most babies may be born with perfect pitch, new research suggests, only to lose it if they do not learn a language that depends on tones to convey meaning or do not undergo early musical training.

Perfect pitch--the ability to name any musical note that one hears--is common among native speakers of tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese, even if they had no musical training, psychologist Diana Deutsch at UC San Diego discovered.

“We conclude this ability resulted from their early acquisition of tone language and that they had learned to associate pitches with meaningful words very early in life,” Deutsch said.