On Alternating Sounds

Attention has been called recently to an interesting phenomenon, which, in a somewhat misleading way, has been termed "soundblindness."It was observed that a considerable number of individuals cannot distinguish differences in key and timbre of sounds which are easily discerned by ordinary ears.The similarity of this phenomenon to color-blindness led to the adoption of the name of "sound-blindness."An exact analogue of color-blindness would, of course, be a case of lacking faculty to distinguish the key of sounds, but this, so far as the writer is aware, has never been observed.The characteristic feature of sound-blindness is inability to perceive the essential peculiarities of certain sounds.Investigation of this subject has been carried on exclusively in regard to the phonology of languages, researches being made on the faculty of individuals to recognize certain consonants and vowels.It is well known that on hearing for the first time a word of which we do not know the derivation we are liable to misunderstand it.This fact may arise from two causes: The word may be so long that we are unable to grasp its phonetic components and their sequence at a single hearing, or we may fail to perceive the peculiar character of each phonetic element.We have to consider here only the second case.Experiments on this subject have generally been made on children, as it is comparatively easy to find words unknown to them.Such words are dictated, the children try to render them by writing, and the misspelled words are studied.Recently Miss Sara E. Wiltse, at the instance of Prof. G. Stanley Hall, made a very interesting study of this phenomenon, the results of which have been published in the "American Journal of Psychology," i, p. 702.She discovered very soon that long words, as ultramarine, altruistic, frustrate, ultimatum, etc., gave unsatisfactory results, as the children failed to grasp the sequence of the component sounds.Next a series of monosyllabic words, suggested by Dr. Clarence J. Blake, was experimented with, which gave very interesting results.In the word fan, for instance, thef was