Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Fixed

I think I have the comment thing worked out. Thanks for your patience.

A new update on the Aymara elicitation sessions will be up soon.

posted by jason @ 9:26 PM   6 Comments


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6 Comments:

At 12:41 PM , Anonymous ACW said...

Testing, testing.

 
At 3:23 PM , Blogger jason said...

Looks like it works, eh?

 
At 12:01 PM , Blogger Jacky said...

Hi, Jason,

I was wondering if you could help me with a problem regards voiced and voieless fricatives.

My 6yr old daughter is being taught THRASS at school (not sure if you're familar with this method, but it's basically IPA for kids). On her THRASS chart she's given 'th' as in thumb, and 'th' as in feather to learn. When I say them, I can hear and feel that the 1st is voiceless, the 2nd, voiced.

Now, when my daughter's teacher said she was having difficulty getting her students to differentiate between the two, I commented that one one's voiced, the other isn't; surely (besides getting them to learn dental placement)they could just try and feel for the difference in vibration by putting a hand to their throats. She tried out the sounds for her self and said 'no, they're both voiced.' We're also given a CD as a hearing aid to the the THRASS chart and even on the CD the linguists go out of their way to voice both. (They don't say the whole word 'thumb' just the 'th' (but they force the sound like 'thu').

Can you clarify what's going wrong? ? Is one voiced and one not? And how much does dialect play a part on whether they're voiced or unvoiced?

Jacky.

 
At 5:35 PM , Blogger jason said...

Hi Jacky.


I'm not at all familiar with the THRASS system, but you are correct in assuming that in Standard American English, 'th' as in 'thumb' (represented as /θ/)is voiceless and 'th'as in 'the' (represented as /ð/)is voiced. Although I can't think of any minimal pairs (two different words that only differ in that one sound)to distinguish them, I believe they are separate phonemes. I don't know of any dialect of english that pronounces them both as voiced (though I have not been exposed to every dialect).

If your daughter is being given both as separate sounds, how is the teacher distinguishing between the two? The only real difference between these sounds (except maybe really subtle variations in place of articulation in some dialects), is voicing. Does the teacher say they're different without saying how they're different? Seems a bit odd.

I say, you know what the difference is, you teach your daughter how to tell them about. Teach her about voicing. My son is the same age and he gets it. Just have her put her hand to her throat and say the first sound in 'thumb' then the first sound in 'them.' Or better yet, for starters, have her put her hand on your throat.

Good luck, I hope this helps. I'll be happy to talk more about it if you like.

 
At 3:27 AM , Blogger Jacky said...

Thanks for getting back so quickly, Jason. I have to admit the problem's driving me a bit nuts.

I'm British (if it helps). I'm also in my final year of my English Language Degree with Classical Studies (one of them mature stuidents!). I took my degree because during the 70's eary 80's English teaching hit a black spot over here: the basics of grammar weren't taught and a whole generation seemed to miss out (battles over prescriptive v descriptive teaching were taking place). I think I left school like most with a spelling and grammar usage all of my own - and a general hate of the language because the rules that were being prescribed seemed nothing more than acts of class extremism. We were also mid-hype the miner's strike where the working class were fighting for their rights to strike and earn better pay. It wasn't a good time to carry on teaching English with a view to keep the working class in its place.

Sorry, off topic there a bit...

My daughter's teacher is teaching dental placement, but, from the look of it, not the phonetic difference. To have her say so strongly that they're both voiced left me questioning what I'd been taught. I have a lot of respect for teachers, their grades are always gonna be better than mone (I not the brightest spark in the bunch) and I didn't argue the point with her. It did make me go back to my books, see that one is voiced one isn't, but I was still left doubting what I was reading. Hence contacting you.

My daughter's doing really well with her decoding and encoding skills. It's just worrying me that she has this teacher for her next year's study.

I personally think THRASS is a fantstic teaching method. My daughter can say 'mom, the graphemes in 'said' are 's ai d' not 's e d', the 'ai' digraph makes an 'eh' sound. And I'm happy with that. She knows the spelling choices and uses the vocab' to explain why. I just wonder how cnfused she might get next year if I'm saying one thing and her teacher's telling her another.

And Did I read you had a Phd in linguitics? I'd love the opprtunity to take my studies further. I fell in love with corpora analysis and I'd defend functional grammar 'til the cows come home. Can I ask what your language passions are?

And I'm sorry if you've got this again. It's really playing up.

 
At 2:00 PM , Blogger jason said...

It sounds like THRASS might be really good, but your daughter's teacher might be having trouble getting the concept of voicing. I still don't get what the teacher is trying to achieve. If she says that the sounds are both voiced, but she wants the children to differentiate between them, where is the difference that she is looking for? The place and manner of articulation are the same. The only difference is voicing. It's obviously not your job to teach the teacher, but perhaps there are other teachers of the same system that you can confer with? People who might be able to clear it up for your daughter's teacher? I wouldn't worry about forcing your daughter to choose between you and her teacher, you can let her know the "teacher answer" isn't always the right answer. Or, it may be right, but require some expansion. It's a good lesson in politics.

I hope that you did not read anywhere that I have a PhD in linguistics, because that would be false. Is someone spreading lies about me? No. I'm currently finishing a Masters Degree in Linguistics. I just have to write a few papers. I have decided not to pursue a PhD, largely because it would be too disruptive to my life right now (I like to actually spend time with my wife and son on occasion).

As far as what I'm really in to, I like morphology best. Figuring out how to chop up words into little meaningful bits is something that is engaging and relatively easy for me. I have spent my last three summers in Mexico working on a language preservation project with a dialect of Zapotec. That's been an incredible experience, gathering and transcribing data, and It's given me the opportunity to do quite a bit of morpho-syntactic analysis.

I don't know much about functional grammar, but I recently bought a copy of Susumu Kuno's "Functional Syntax." I'm using his Empathy Theory for one of my papers. As yet I have no bias for or against. One of my problems with academia is the partisan nature of the discourse. I won't say that everybody's right, but I like to keep an open mind...

By the way, I think your "off topic" background story is really interesting. Language is often used to keep people in their place (on the one hand) and to show class identity( on the other). If you're interested in this, I recommend taking some socio-linguistics classes. Good luck with your degree.

 

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