Steve Martin’s favorite comic moment of his entire career is the “hamburger” scene from The Pink Panther (2006), he once told People magazine. Martin plays Inspector Clouseau, who has an aggressively exaggerated French accent. In the scene, he is trying to learn how to say, “I would like to buy a hamburger,” with a dialect coach. “Dam-buergaaaaa,” he purrs at his coach, along with increasingly ridiculous permutations of all of the other words in the sentence.
The scene is funny because it’s true for so many of us: Learning a new language as an adult can be hard. The unfamiliar sounds may get tangled up in the mouth like marbles, and the results can sound like gibberish. But for other people, new foreign words seem to roll off the tongue and adopting different accents comes easily. Their secret may lie in how they listen, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. People who are better at detecting small differences in the frequency of raw sound are better at picking up new foreign speech sounds, and thus might be quicker to learn new languages, the study found.
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