>This sounds plausible and I want it to be true but I have doubts that every phoneme of every world language can be discriminated by adults after the early-childhood language acquisition.
It's almost trivial if you're trained to listen rather than decode. Opera singers can achieve perfect pronunciation of languages they don't comprehend at all, through the use of IPA. The words are absolutely meaningless to them, they're just very precisely recreating a certain set of sounds. Their musical listening skills transfer directly into pronunciation.
If you can learn to sing Sygyt as an adult, I think you can cope with a couple of tricky phonemes in a foreign language.
Like OP, I think that the comparison with visual art is very apt. Most people see on a functional level, identifying objects rather than seeing their literal forms. As a result, they tend to draw the abstract idea of a thing rather than the literal appearance of a thing. Learning to draw involves unlearning that windows are rectangular, that chairs have legs of equal length, that a soccer ball is spherical.
If we're primed to pay attention to one thing, it vastly diminishes our ability to recognise other things:
I feel the need to point out that IPA is insufficiently granular to truly capture the pronunciation of all the world's languages. It's basically a discrete approximation of what is an infinite, continuous space. I'm sure, though, that it can be very useful for opera singers and as an IPA fan I'm glad to see it get a mention :-)
It's almost trivial if you're trained to listen rather than decode. Opera singers can achieve perfect pronunciation of languages they don't comprehend at all, through the use of IPA. The words are absolutely meaningless to them, they're just very precisely recreating a certain set of sounds. Their musical listening skills transfer directly into pronunciation.
If you can learn to sing Sygyt as an adult, I think you can cope with a couple of tricky phonemes in a foreign language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_14pb2i6Sc
Like OP, I think that the comparison with visual art is very apt. Most people see on a functional level, identifying objects rather than seeing their literal forms. As a result, they tend to draw the abstract idea of a thing rather than the literal appearance of a thing. Learning to draw involves unlearning that windows are rectangular, that chairs have legs of equal length, that a soccer ball is spherical.
If we're primed to pay attention to one thing, it vastly diminishes our ability to recognise other things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNF9QNEQLA