The formation of sounds in English by infants is predictable and developmental. So, it was of particular note to me that someone told me that learning sounds was genetic. I am not certain what the person meant exactly since I was told by a third party bearing news of someone who was told first-hand, but I took it to mean that people are controlled by their genes as to whether they can form the sounds of all the available sounds in the language they are born into. This flies in the face of current observation and theory.
An infant learns sounds naturally, no matter what language, The human speaking apparatus of tongue, palate, mouth cavity, nasal passage, lips, pharynx, and larynx have been toyed with for many, many thousand years. It's no mystery on how sounds are made, how many sounds have been made, which sounds are easiest to make, which are hardest, and which come in early in an infant's development, which are later. So imagine my astonishment when I was told that a child had to be taken speech therapy at age 4 for defective sounds and that it was genetic because there was not a hearing or vision problem that impeded the sounds, no malformation of any of the speaking apparatus parts, no environmental intrusion causing sound to be warped, and normal parents who had no history of phonetic malformation when young.
The child had particular problems pronouncing the so-called hidden sounds because they cannot be readily seen like the gutteral sounds at the back of the mouth cavity at the top of the throat. But an anomaly occurred. Nasals, such as m and n, were not malformed whereas l and r were. This for sure discounts the genetic theory. All of these sounds have a constant flow of air and voice, like vowels do, but the air stream is redirected inside the mouth where no one can see how exactly they are redirected with the exception of m which one can see (the lips are closed in order to direct the air flow through the nose rather than through the mouth).
I think the culprit for the young boy's trouble is not in the genes, but in missing the stage from about 3-9 months of age when the infant studies the faces of the caregivers to produce just the right sounds of the language they have been born into. Not being in a position to see and study would delay or allow one to miss altogether how to form the needed sounds to develop and later compete with others in acceptable communication.
It's a little bit like Freud's theory of missing the crawling stage and having problems with socialization in teen and young adult years. The young boy is 6, so he still has another couple of years to work on seeing and hearing how the formation of sounds happens, but it will increasingly be an issue for him since his need to communicate with others his age begins to help him establish his role and place in his world. A smart language therapist will give him some dialect substitute sounds to compensate for the stage he missed. It's quite acceptable to hear people pronounce here as heah. No one makes a big deal about that. Or the acceptable Boston brogue which drops r's at the ends of words or near the ends of words as in pahk for park, and caw for car. Dropping the l altogether in all but the initial position in a word is quite acceptable as well. No doubt the young man will learn the compensations and become a full-fledged, successful member of society. But if this development is genetic, then the therapist who made the statement ought to make a full-blown case study of this encounter and publish it because it would be rare, to say the least.
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