The blur gap

Native speakers are not aware of the jungle. They don’t see the jungle: they believe that the language they are speaking and hearing is from the greenhouse/garden.

Image from here

Native speakers suffer a particular kind of deafness that I refer to as ‘the blur gap’. This the gap between the native-speaker’s perception, and belief, that full words (e.g. ‘where there were’) were spoken, and the acoustic fact that only small traces (e.g. [we.ðe.wə] ‘weatherwuh’), were present in the sound substance that reaches their ears.

I like to think, but I don’t know, that non-native speakers may actually have a more accurate view of what is present in the sound substance than the native speaker teacher, whose perceptual processes ‘improve’ the sound substance (and they are unaware of the improvement) from jungle state to the garden state.