We start learning language in the womb. Newborns recognize the language that surrounded them in utero, and the relatively silent weeks of early infancy are a season of pruning. There are too many potential phonetic contrasts for me to count easily; babies learn early on to attend to the ones that matter in their native language. At six months old, babies know which vowels are part of their native language and which ones are not.
Over time we lose the ability to hear the distinctiveness of those non-native vowels. In the German class I took as a freshman in college, our instructor was astounded that we could not tell /ø, œ/ from /ʊ/. She contrasted them again and again. "You can't hear that?" she asked, as if she had discovered we were all deaf to something as obvious as a siren or an alarm clock. In a way, I suppose, we were.
Entropy asked me how I said "thought" and "hot" so that they did not rhyme, and I thought, "Oh, I will post a recording! A multimedia post! How 2013 of me." I realized quickly that a recording wouldn't do much good. I have trained myself, slowly and painstakingly, to hear and to produce the rounded front vowels /y/ and /ø/. (Don't ask me about the others. I would be a terrible Danish speaker.) Our students learn, with varying degrees of success, to distinguish between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ for their phonetics courses. But it's not an easy thing for adults.
It occurred to me that a visual aid might be helpful. The reason vowels sound different is that they are acoustically different: for each vowel we produce bands of sound energy, called formants, in different places. (If you are finding this post dull, you should know that I am restraining myself from singing the beauties of the vowel quadrilateral: the bold downward slash of F2 above the gentle and symmetrical arc of F1. Oops, so much for restraint.)
(You guys, I just downloaded Praat, a free software program for acoustic analysis, so I could make you some images. I recorded myself running through the vowel quadrilateral and I got this actual physical frisson of satisfaction at the formants I could trace through the resulting spectrogram. It looks exactly like the ones in the books! Exactly! I...think I might be a geek.)
This is what it looks like when I contrast "ah" and "aw." If you click to enlarge, you can see the subtle shift in the middle of the spectrogram. (The change happens to the right of the red line. I am brand new to Praat and I don't have time to figure out red line removal before Mass.)
This is what it looks like when I contrast /u/ (as in "cute") and /ʊ/ (as in "put"). Again, the shift comes in the middle, to the right of the red line.
And here's a recording, in case it helps.
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