So I remember ancedotally speaking this discussion from grad school, applied linguistics, ELT, etc.
We were discussing the importance or unimportance of the sound [zh] as in 'beige', 'rouge', 'garage', etc--if you say the sound as a 'continuous' one (not using technical language here because I don't think it would be appreciated anyway). Now the traditional structuralist argument (within applied linguistics, ELT, etc.) was this sound is not an important one to teach because of this structuralist idea of 'cognitive load' (the structuralists who for the most part were behaviorists get 'cognitive' on occasion if they think it suits their arguments). The argument went, this sound in English has little cognitive load and so is not an important one to teach. So I asked, why? How do you know it has little cognitive load. And the answer was: one, it appears in words that are not that common (indeed, fairly recent imports from French--see, it's a French sound even); two, we can not juxtaposition a lot of words to show 'minimal pairs' that contrast this [zh] with some other similar sibilant consonant. On the contrary, even if it doesn't appear frequently in the lexicon or even in a few frequently used words, it is all over the place in actual spoken English. If a word ends in a voiced [z] and is followed by a [j] as at the beginning of 'your', chances are co-articulation (assimilation, mutual assimilation) creates a [zh] sound in the liaison. Like: Please yourself. So much for structuralist sureties. Cognitive load my arse. Now I like structures and symbols, that's for sure. So why is the symbol of the hexagon the god of the bees? CJ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
