ABSTRACT
First, analog acoustic patterns must be converted to digital codes at multiple levels of language-specific structure, including distinctive features, phonemes, syllables, and words (Box 5.1). After all, the sentences John appeared to Mary to be brave and John appealed to Mary to be brave differ by only one distinctive feature at one phoneme position in one word, but that is nevertheless sufficient to lead to radically different interpretations (Jackendoff & Pinker, 2005, p. 215). It is also worth noting that while the subtle contrast between /r/ and /l/ is easily noticed by native speakers of English, it is very difficult to detect, even with close attention, for speakers of languages that do not make such a phonological distinction, like Japanese.
