That's interesting, when Dr. T. says the mother tongue
affects the way we hear and understand sounds in the external environment. I wonder if he meant non-verbal sounds, as well. I'm reminded of the post or article I read where it gave the different sounds that are assigned to represent a dog's bark, in different languages. There was quite a lot of variation.
Definitely, your mother tongue affects the way you hear language. My Turkish friend taught me to count to ten in his language. Number one is pronounced beer, and of course that's what I thought he was saying at first--he laughed when I told him I didn't have any! I've always been rather envious of those who managed to be brought up in a bilingual home. I think it's accurate that a language learned after puberty will be learned imperfectly (in general). The age where our brains are best-equipped for taking in another language is before the age of six.
A corollary to knowing our mother tongue best, and having more difficulty with one(s) learned subsequently is the way our brains seem to be "wired" for remembering: what we learn first stays with us the longest. Remember trying to
learn lists of spelling or vocabulary words? The words at the top of the list were the easiest to memorize. What's at the end is next-easiest, and for most of us the middle gets lost. That's why I had my children learn to recognize the letters of the alphabet at random: I wanted all letters to have an "equal opportunity", as it were. How many songs can you recall only the first line of? I'll bet everyone knows do-re-mi, and with another second, la-ti-do.
Do you have to make more effort to think of the middle two?
But also, our life experiences affect what we comprehend. A funny example comes from a catalog that advertised Owl brand clothing, made of Goretex fabric. Apparently they had to put in a disclaimer saying that they were aware that Al Gore did not live in Texas! My point is that which I made in another long-ago post: we tend to try to fit new experiences into something that we have a frame of reference for, or an understanding of. I think a great many people were and are not familiar with Owl Goretex, so their minds interpreted it as Al Gore, Tex. (sort of), because the words Al Gore were extremely familiar, and
Owl Gore(tex) was not.
