Where there is room for variation in pronunciation, I tend to pronounce words very literally, very close to how they are written. I pronounce the T instead of using a glottal stop in words like button (I have both pronunciations around me, I haven't done enough observation to work out which one I'm supposed to have ended up with). I pronounce Tuesday as "toooosday" instead of "chewsday" (I've heard "chewsday" from people with similar background and education who should have developed the exact same pronunciation as I have, but again I haven't done enough observation because I just thought of this). I know there are others because I've noticed them, both IRL and when we were doing Canadian dialects in my linguistics classes, but I can't think of examples offhand.
I'm wondering if this might be because I learned to read using phonics at a very early age - I think I started learning at the age of 2, and by the age of 4 I could fluently read age-appropriate books. I spent less time during my formative years having an auditory-only relationship with my rightful accent, and more time with the internalized concept of one-to-one correlation between letters and pronunciation. (I know it isn't actually one-to-one, but you can't exactly explain the subtleties to a two-year-old).
In support of this hypothesis is my very literal pronunciation, and the fact that I tend to mispronounce words because I've only seen them written more than other people do. (I was 25 before I realized that the written word and verbal pronunciation of annihilated are in fact one word.) I also tend to fudge my vowels a bit when the spelling is different - I don't pronounce buoy and boy exactly the same, even though I remember learning the word as a child and I thought it was "boy", but I still pronounce buoy with one syllable instead of "booo-ey" which is the accepted alternate pronunciation. And I do caught and cot, and collar and caller, like half a phoneme different - not as much as in accents where it's a proper accent feature, but not identically the same even though I think I pronounce them identically the same. (Can I has a few linguistics cred points for knowing that I pronounce something differently but think I pronounce it the same?)
On the other hand, I did manage to acquire Canadian raising, which is acquired strictly through aural assimilation and contradicts strict phonetics. And I Canadian raise in exactly the right places despite the fact that I devoice all my final consonants, which is an inherited accent feature aurally assimilated from the ESL side of my family and also contradicts phonetics.
I haven't talked to any other early readers about this or made proper observations of my family's pronunciations, but if other early readers have the same thing it would be an interesting thing to research.
4 comments:
This is very interesting.
People who are profoundly deaf has a much more difficult time learning to read than hearing people. Does that figure in?
Mild yet still "real" unexamined Medical factors can also play a role. Besides unintended alternations of vocal soundings, another speech symptom - when unexplained by regional difference - is pausing upon a syllable. For example, Tuuesday or tuesdaay rather than Tuesday.
L-girl: I never thought about that before, but I guess deaf people wouldn't come into learning to read with an existing concept of what a word is, which would make reading that much harder. Which I guess means that my whole finger-spelling at deaf people (because I couldn't learn ASL) thing is far less helpful than I thought. If only that had ASL classes where you're allowed to talk while you're learning the signs.
Cq: like what kinds of medical factors?
Tourettes is a disease for which I've heard of such lite speech difficulties affliction, besides its more recognized and severe symptom.
Other possibilities can be a stuttering problem or a physical concern corrected during person's younger development.
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