The Sound House
First, think of all the sounds which can be produced by the human vocal apparatus as a set of building materials. The basic materials, vowels and consonants, are bricks. Otherbuilding materials (wood, mortar, plaster, stone) stand in for things like tone, vowelharmony, and length, which are part of the articulation of vowels and consonants, but provide another layer of meaning-bearing sound in many languages. Thus far, we aretalking about phonetics: the production and perception of the full set of possible sounds.Children are born with two things: a set of language blueprints wired into the brain, which gives them some intuitive understanding of very basic rules of language. They alsohave a set of tools which goes along with these blueprints.Now think of the language acquisition process as a newborn who begins to build a SoundHouse. The Sound House is the “home” of the language, or what we have been callingaccent – the phonology – of the child’s native tongue. At birth the child is in the SoundHouse warehouse, where a full inventory of all possible materials is available to her. Shelooks at the Sound Houses built by her parents, her brothers and sisters, by other peoplearound her, and she starts to pick out those materials, those bricks she sees they have usedto build their Sound Houses. She may experiment with other bricks, with a bit of wood,but in the end she settles down to duplicating the Sound Houses she sees around her. Shesets up her inventory of sounds in relationship to each other; she puts up walls, plans thespace: she is constructing her phonology. The blueprints tell her that she must have certain supporting structures; she does this.She wanders around in her parents’ Sound Houses and sees how they do things. She makesmistakes; ?xes them. In the process, she makes small innovations. Maybe this child has parents who speak English and Gaelic, or who are natives of Cincinnati and speak what they think of as standard American English, as well as African American English Vernacular. The parents each have two Sound Houses, or perhaps oneSound House with two wings. She has two houses to build at once. Sometimes she mixesmaterials up, but then sorts them out. Maybe she builds a bridge between the two struc-tures. Maybe a connecting courtyard.
1. Explain in your own words what you think that metaphor means.
2. What does the idea of style shifting do to the Sound House analogy?
3. Many people are bilingual or multilingual, and for each language they also have multiple styles. Is there a way to adapt the metaphor to account for this, or does it simply break down?