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 _________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html