Most Important Feature in Language Comprehension: Part II

Nearly two months after I first decided on what I believe to be the most important feature in language comprehension, I still believe that sounds are more important than syntax or vocabulary, for the same reasons I did before. A recent experience supports me in this claim: when watching "Das Leben Des Anderen" (The Lives of Others), a German-language film, I was able to comprehend a good deal of the movie even though I do not speak German fluently. Although I was unfamiliar with much of the vocabulary, and some of the syntax was not phrased the same way I would have phrased it, I could have written out the script as I was listening to the movie because I understood all the sounds being made. The sounds were familiar to me, and so I could understand the speech even if not all the specific words. And even though German syntax can be sometimes confusing ("I went to the supermarket to buy some meat" = "I have to the supermarket some meat to buy gone"), I could rearrange the words in my head and make sense of it. This experience, being conducted in a foreign language, is an extreme version of the comprehension between speakers of different dialects of the same language.

Lexical Differences

In my experience, lexical differences are less of a hamper in comprehension of another person's dialect. Vocabulary can be easily explained, and context plays a huge role in understanding what another person is saying. It is not important for someone to understand every word another person is saying - through tone of voice, nonverbal clues, and context, one can almost always figure out what the unknown word means. The problem arises when a word is given out of context, such as descriptive expletives. One example I can give of this is the word "hyphy" (I'm not sure how this is spelled, having never seen it in writing). As far as I can tell, the word is used frequently in Northern California, perhaps only in the Bay Area, which is where my roommate Maddy is from. She uses the word hyphy when giving her opinion on types of music and a kind of drunk/high state that people are in. I had never heard it before she used it. When I asked her to explain its meaning, she could not define it using words, but rather showed me several videos on YouTube that apparently were of "hyphy music." She even asked her boyfriend, who is from the same area as her, to define the word and he could not. I have heard that the word "crunk" is a synonym for hyphy that is used on the East Coast. In Portland, where I am from, if someone is high, drunk, and dancing, we use those three words to describe the person. So my not knowing the word hyphy didn't really impede conversation between me and Maddy, because she showed me to some degree what she meant and we moved past it.
Other lexical differences I have noticed have to do with synonyms, like hyphy/crunk, spike/cleat (the kind of shoe that soccer players and cross country runners wear), and pop/soda. For the most part, both participants in conversation are aware of the other words used as synonyms, and when someone repeats the word to question its meaning the speaker can seamlessly supply the synonym. I suppose there would arise more problems for people who speak English as a second language, because they would generally learn just one word for a particular object or concept. However, even then lexical differences are much easier to circumlocute than the struggles that arise with discrepancies in sounds made to create the lexicon of English. Over the course of this quarter as I have been recording miscommunications that arise, the majority have resulted from differences in pronunciation.