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The importance of a good accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 57 of 255 13 December 2010 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You know, Serge, the topic of what one needs to do to reach near-native fluency passed the "critical period", is in itself thread-worthy... Edited by Arekkusu on 13 December 2010 at 6:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 58 of 255 13 December 2010 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think anybody here claims that they don't care about their accent as long as they are understood. Quite the contrary, everybody here most certainly would love to speak with the best accent possible. Who wouldn't? What I see is that some people, including myself, believe that learning to native-like speaking performance is not a necessary goal in learning a language. This does not in any way disparage those who pursue that goal. As I work on my Spanish, I'm not really interested in sounding like someone from Madrid or Havana or Buenos Aires. It would probably turn a few heads and flatter my ego if I could sound like someone who grew up on the streets of Havana Vieja. For the time being, however, I'm satisfied with my pronunciation that is, I've been told, quite good. What I really want to work on is the subjunctive mood and idioms. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 59 of 255 13 December 2010 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Two things I want to address:
Accent vs pronunciation and the critical period hypothesis
Accent is not the same as pronunciation, true, but they are not different things. Accent is a part of pronunciation. There is no one thing that is definitely "accent" -- "an accent" is, in the strictest sense, simply a set of minor variations in pronunciation arising from our particular social group. While I would love to say "accent doesn't matter", unfortunately my strict definition isn't what the majority of learners think of as accent. What's the most popular non-native accent in English? The "French accent", by a mile. But characteristics of that accent include the inability to distinguish certain phonemes: TH vs T/D, I vs EE, TCH vs SH. That is incorrect pronunciation, but that is what people call "accent" in the real world. So in the popular usage of the term, "accent" is important. And it is only the popular usage of the term that matters, because that's the meaning that people will naturally assume when they hear the word. Looking at the French example, I know a French teacher here in Edinburgh who can pronounce most of the phonemes of English, but he doesn't use them in speech. He can say both TH sounds and he can say TCH. But he doesn't in speech. Why? Because he wasn't taught to make the sounds when he first started, it would appear that his brain remembered TH phonemes as T or D, and TCH phonemes as SH (or more strictly French CH). So in his head the word "thatch" would be stored phonemically as "tash" (or French "tâche"). Because his vocabulary is built on a flawed model of the phonemes of English, he can't just modify his accent. If he modified his accent so as to pronounce "thatch" properly, the knock-on effect would be that he would end up pronouncing "moustache" as "mus-thatch". In order to get correct pronunciation, he would have to relearn all the vocabulary with any of these problem phonemes. He knows he could do it, and he knows how to do it (as I said, he's a language teacher) but he just reckons that at this stage it will take too much effort to be worthwhile. So I say you've got to go for good pronunciation right from the start, because it's a choice that you cannot make further down the line. I nearly made the same mistake in Spanish, and this comes back to the popular notion of "accent". A lot of people ask: "I want to learn Spanish. Which accent should I learn?" I started with the MT course, which goes for a neutral accent, but one which doesn't make a distinction between S and Z or the soft C. I then spent a lot of time with people from Catalonia, and their Spanish accent does make the distinction. Because I'd learned S and Z/C as the same phoneme, when I tried to imitate them, the results were random. The most common example was "ezpesial" instead of "especial". If I hadn't started speaking to those people when I did, I'm quite certain I would have ended up unable to make the distinction, and I'm glad I can. I can now chose to speak in a South American or southern Spanish accent instead of my normal northern one. But at the same time, I'd also caution against early focus on "native-like" accent. You can get quite a good approximation of certain sounds without building up an accurate internal model of the phonetics, and I personally believe that a rough accent with correct phonology will usually lead to a good accent in the long run. On the other hand a good accent based on incorrect phonology will limit your potential for future development. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 60 of 255 13 December 2010 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
Do you necessarily find them worse translators than you are? :)
What you keep failing to explain is 'why?'. Why would someone need to spend all that time and hard work if language serves him well in all aspects of life? Why would he do that instead of getting a joy of learning another language to a high level? As I said many times here - people who want and achieve native accent should be praised because that is a great achievement. But these people should also understand that not being bothered with your foreign accent doesn't by default mean you are a careless language learner and you don't care about your vocab and grammar as well. That's simply a prejudice. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 61 of 255 13 December 2010 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Now, as for the critical period hypothesis....
The Critical Period Hypothesis is an attempt to explain an observed phenomenon. Researchers looked at children of immigrants placed into an immersive environment in a new language. They measured the percentage of non-native errors in their speech as adults and drew a plot of the percentage of errors against the age they arrived in the new country. The resulting graph showed a gradual decline in nativeness that increased sharply around the onset of puberty and started to level out at the age of physical maturity. Most versions of the critical period hypothesis take this to mean that the physical and physiological changes are the trigger for the loss of ability. The most common argument against this is one that others have already raised here: puberty leads to self-consciousness, which inhibits the ability to learn a language. I am inclined to assume that there is more to it than that, and I personally believe that physiological changes have at least some part to play in this. However, even although I accept the critical period hypothesis in its basic form, I object to the term "critical". I believe that what we see there is nothing more than a change of learning mechanism. After all, there are natural languages in this world that are never learned by children pre-puberty, tribal "adults' languages" that are only taught to young men and women after their coming-of-age ceremonies. (Linguists and pedagogs alike would dearly love to study these languages to find out more about the natural adult language learning process, but as these coming-of-age ceremonies generally involve painful surgery without anaesthetic or disinfectant, the chances of finding one crazy enough to study the languages is pretty low. I have never looked "penile subduction" up in a dictionary, but I know I don't like the sound of it.) No, I feel that a lot of the perceived deficiency in the adult brain can be overcome by designing your material around the adult brain. Certainly, there are several major studies claiming to prove that the syntax of adult-learned languages is stored in a different area of the brain than the syntax of infant-learned language. (But like all studies, some people dispute the results.) The big thing we're discussing here is accent, so I'll go back to that. The adult brain, according to conventional wisdom, cannot learn to hear new phonemes. Why? Received wisdom says the brain learns which sounds are important and then wires them in, and then they're fixed. This cannot be true. Why do I say that? Because a child brought up on a commune with no machinery can learn in adulthood to be a mechanic, driver or engineer, and will learn to distinguish the sounds that indicate faults in the machinery, a need for oiling, or when he is over- or under-revving the engine and needs to change gear. An adult brought up in an African city can learn to distinguish European songbirds. All it takes to learn new sounds is a meaningful framework. As a driver, you get a lot of feedback from your car through from the simple "smoothness" of running up to having occasional (or frequent) breakdowns. You learn to associate the sound with the condition that they are warning of. Supplying that feedback for pronunciation is tricky. To do it naturally, without conscious study, you would have to include a lot of minimal pairs, but in doing that, you would end up with very artificial language, which would be demotivating and difficult for the students. In fact, most courses use sounds so different that the differences between phonemes aren't necessary at all for comprehension. Consider a course with this dialogue as lesson 1: John: Hello. Jane: Hello. My name is Jane. What is your name? John: My name is John. How do you do? Jane: Very well, thank you. And how are you? John: I am well. I must go. Jane: Goodbye. If this is all the language you're dealing with, the phonemic distinctions are redundant. "Thank you" is recognisable if you replace the unvoiced TH with T, D or a voiced TH. You can mispronounce "you" quite heavily and it will still be recognisable simple because it follows "thank". And this will continue throughout the course -- the use of fixed phrases means that the learner can rely on any one of a million cues to work out what's being said, so the brain is never forced to see the phonemic distinction as meaningful. After a long time learning without making the distinction, the learner gets trapper, just like my French pal from the last post. Now, even though I said I believe the Critical Period Hypothesis (to an extent), much of the observed difficulties could be explained in terms of this same trapping. As you progress through school, you use more specialised vocabulary, and that means longer and fancier words. A 14 year old entering the school system in a foreign language will be faced with words relating to the sciences, mathematics and the study of literature among others. A child starting in the first or second year of primary school will be faced with little more complicated than "add", "take away", "paintbrush" and "favourite colour". The later you enter the system, the more complicated the language you will encounter (in terms of everything: phonology, grammatical complexity, orthography, semantics...) and the immediate need to understand doesn't encourage or reward progressive development of accurate language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 62 of 255 13 December 2010 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
That describes me. I never liked to be an "actor". Way back in elementary school when we had to participate in the so-called "Christmas Concert" and play somebody, I was uncomfortable with that sort of acting. And I am still a bit uncomfortable speaking differently than I do in my native language, both for pronunciation and sentence structure. For example, I am more comfortable in Dutch and German which are more English-like in pronunciation and "lack of flourish" than Romance/Latin languages which require what seems to me to be immersion and intensity, and to me, "play-acting". So when I try to do that, I know I am only getting it partly done, and it probably sounds like poor play-acting. I don't get that feeling in Dutch and German. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 63 of 255 13 December 2010 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well here's a "why" for you: Received wisdom says we learn a new phoneme when we hear it enough, but I think that's upside down. For me, it feels like I can only learn to hear a phoneme if I can pronounce it myself. I couldn't hear the difference between R and RR in Spanish. But by learning to say it and learning the words, I was able to tie what I was hearing to what I knew about the language. Same with the slender/broad distinction in Gaelic. I couldn't hear the distinction between the four types of N when I started, but I spent months saying it not quite correctly, but close, before I could tell whether the people I was speaking to were saying it correctly or not (I spent a lot of time with other adult learners when I was starting out). Would I have learnt to hear it if I hadn't been saying it? I don't believe so. As I said a short while ago, if you pronounce two different things the same, your brain's going to learn them as the same thing. Prime example: French. Some of my classmates in my French class in the summer would often ask about which accent goes on which E. The way I know is by the sound it makes, but they pronounce e, é and è all the same. They had all been studying formally or learning informally (or both) for years -- at a minimum 2.5 years, and some of them for dozens of years, including some who even live in France. But the e, é and è sounds that they initially learned as the same never, ever seem to split up into three different sounds -- the brain seems incapable of spontaneously separate an erroneous phoneme into distinct phonemes. If you don't get the sounds early on, you never will. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5867 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 64 of 255 13 December 2010 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think a part of that is good hearing. After a career flying noisy military aircraft, my hearing above 3 KHz is less than it should be. For second language study, I use a spectrum equalizer on my computer to compensate (by amplifying higher tones). That helps in comprehension, and I am sure it helps in trying to achieve better pronunciation. You can't say what you can't hear. It would be interesting to know if people who have excellent pronunciation in two or more languages have always had, and continue to enjoy, excellent hearing. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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