Native Language vs Hearing?

[beefkabob]

Different languages have different phonemes and accents. Do these differences lead to varying sensitivity to sound frequency and other parts of sound?

Like most if not all non-Chinese speakers, I'm mostly deaf to Chinese tones. I often cannot tell a non-English phoneme from similar English phoneme, and pronouncing that phoneme is even harder.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Harman research was done on exactly this in regards to speaker preference. No difference in results.

 

[anmpr1]

Different languages have different phonemes and accents. Do these differences lead to varying sensitivity to sound frequency and other parts of sound?

Like most if not all non-Chinese speakers, I'm mostly deaf to Chinese tones. I often cannot tell a non-English phoneme from similar English phoneme, and pronouncing that phoneme is even harder.

Tonal inflections are important, but a word's context (i.e. the sound of the enunciation within the complete sentence) will determine overall meaning. This is the case with all homophones, whether the language is tonal, or not. Frequency bandwidth of speech is pretty limited, so I'm not sure any particular sensitivity or discrimination is required--at least anything out of the ordinary. If one's hearing is damaged, it is likely that tonal inflections could not be well distinguished and, consequently, reproduced in speech, but, again, the context of the overall utterance should allow a fluent listener to 'fill in the tonal blanks' anent any particular word within the sentence.

 

[MRC01]

... Like most if not all non-Chinese speakers, I'm mostly deaf to Chinese tones. I often cannot tell a non-English phoneme from similar English phoneme, and pronouncing that phoneme is even harder.

This is related to listener training, not acuity. It's training the brain what to listen for or focus on in the signal that the ears are giving us. When you can't differentiate phonemes from another language, it's not because you can't hear them, but because your brain isn't trained on how to focus on them. Put differently, your ears are hearing them but your brain isn't. The same phenomena happens in blind audio testing, where listeners perform significantly better with training. Their ears were detecting differences all along, but they couldn't hear them until their brains learned how to pick them out.