JAPANESE adults may never be able to discriminate between certain English “l” and “r” sounds, no matter how hard they try, according to Naoyuki Takagi at Tokyo University of Mercantile Marine.
Takagi tried to train 15 Japanese adults who didn’t speak English to identify “l” and “r” sounds in hundreds of different English words. While they did improve over the 15-day training period, there were some words, like “fry” and “fly”, that all the subjects consistently got wrong, performing even worse than chance (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol 111, p 2887). The volunteers weren’t simply guessing but were actually hearing the wrong sounds,…
