The difficulty some native Asian language speakers with pronouncing the "l"
vs. the "rice" in English ("flied lice" instead of "fried rice" is the
standard old joke) has nothing at all to do with tight frenulums.  It has
everything to do with how the brain develops.

In the first 6-8 months of life, a baby's brain learns to recognize the
sounds of the language(s) they hear spoken around them.  If the language
does not distinguish between "l" and "r" in meaning, as many Asian languages
do not, then the baby learns to ignore the difference in sound, and to cease
'hearing' any difference.  It's very difficult, if you can't hear any
difference between the two sounds, to create two different sounds.  This
'priming' of the brain occurs before age one, so it is extremely difficult
to learn to distinguish the two sounds after that date.  You literally
cannot hear any difference between the two sounds.

Of course, the same is true for many native English speakers when trying to
learn how to understand and speak various other foreign languages that make
distinctions we don't have in English.  To us, a person patiently repeating
the two different sounds is just saying the exact same thing twice.  This is
especially a problem for tonal languages, where differences in meaning can
rely on whether the word is said with a high, medium, or low tone, and/or
with a rising or falling tone.

This can create amusing situations, such as when a native English speaker
tries to talk about dogs in Bambara (the language spoken in Mali).  Say it
with the wrong tone, and you're talking about male genitalia instead.
Moral: don't talk about dogs in Mali.

Kathy Dettwyler

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