Introduction

The word ‘lesson’ came back to Pooh as one he had heard before somewhere.

“There’s a thing called Twy-stymes” he said. “Christopher Robin tried to teach it to me once, but it didn’t.”

“What didn't” said Rabbit.

“Didn’t what?” said Piglet.

Pooh shook his head.

“I don’t know” he said. “It just didn’t. What are we talking about?”

Click the English 1 link at left, then click the “play” arrow on the controller to play a sentence. How many words do you hear? You won’t need to click the TRANSLATION link to figure out that there are nine words in this sentence, or to determine that there are seven words in the English 2 sentence.

But as Pooh demonstrates in the passage above, the process of parsing speech streams into words is not as trivial as it seems. Lacking experience with the stream of phonemes “t-w-eye-s-t-eye-m-z” that Christopher Robin uttered when describing what lessons were, Pooh put the word break between the first “eye” and the “s,” instead of between the “s” and the second “t” to form “twice-times.”

You’ve had more experience with English than Pooh, which is why you rarely make this kind of error. But to understand the scope of the problem faced by infants who are trying to learn their first language, as well as adults attempting to pick up a second language, click the Chinese 1 link and try to count the words in the stream of speech there. Then try the Chinese 2 sentence and then finally Arabic 1 and Arabic 2. In each case, you can click the TRANSLATION link to see phonetic translations of the sentences (see the Wikipedia articles on Chinese pinyin and theArabic alphabet for information on exactly how the phonetic translation systems work).

It’s important to note that the Chinese and Arabic sentences are not spoken any faster than the English ones. Indeed, for the Arabic sentences the person is deliberately speaking more slowly than he would in regular conversation. The breaks that you hear so clearly between words in the English sentences (and that Chinese and Arabic speakers would hear clearly in the Chinese and Arabic sentences) are psychological constructions, not physical properties of the sound waves.