The Medical Daily – Dana Dovey
“Are words that are harder to pronounce by default more difficult to understand? Or is it the other way around and our ability to recognize a word is what affects how easy it is to say? This question has puzzled researchers for many years and stands at the heart of helping dyslexic children learn to overcome their disability. A recent study used electromagnetic readings of volunteers’ brains in order to answer this question, and what researchers found may change the way we perceive how our brains learn a language. Humans have the amazing ability to tell which phrases sound like part of a human language and which sound like just an arbitrary mixture of sounds. For example, whether you speak English, French, Russian, or Arabic, the sound combination “blog” will nearly always sound more linguistic than “lbog.” In fact, even nonverbal infants can make this distinction. Now, it’s quite obvious that “lbog” has certain phonetic constraints that make it difficult to pronounce, but this doesn’t seem to be the reason for its absence from languages around the globe.”(more)