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.