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The Accent Conjecture | ||
Tags: Language Acquisition Theory | Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6588 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 1 of 37 15 January 2015 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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After discovering Krashen's site (sdkrashen.com) thanks to the "Pleasure Hypothesis" thread, I clicked around on it and found a very interesting paper:
A Conjecture on Accent in a Second Language This is a conjecture and not a hypothesis, so Krashen admits there's not much concrete evidence, but I find it fascinating. I never realized it before, but nonnative accents make evolutionary sense. People don't fail to acquire a native accent as adults, they succeed in what evolution has taught them to do: mark their speech with clues as to their group membership. A child will pick up languages with the same accent as the group in which they grow up, because this is their group. As they interact with other groups and learn their language, they will have an accent that marks the group they come from. A group of people who flawlessly acquire the language and accents of other groups will risk losing members and thus be selected against. This "output filter" that Krashen talks about rings true to me also in light of my social experience. I play role playing games that are more similar to improv theater than to D&D, and as in improv, relaxing one's self-censorship is amongst the most important and most difficult skills to acquire. It's the same thing with dancing and martial arts, where I have some experience. People's biggest problem is usually that they can't stop doing the movements half-heartedly. They censor themselves. And I can absolutely see how this can be at least a factor in accent. We don't speak Spanish like a Mexican because really going all the way will be uncomfortably like making fun of Mexicans. And even when people really try, the subconscious resistance is still there, which would explain, as Krashen points out, why a bit of alcohol improves your accent. This conjecture makes sense to me and puts accent in a new light. What are your thoughts? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5268 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 37 15 January 2015 at 2:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
This reminds me of what Barry Farber wrote in How to Learn Any Language
Edited by iguanamon on 15 January 2015 at 2:27pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 37 15 January 2015 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can recognize some cases where I choose not to imitate a local vernacular because it could be seen as an attempt to mock the local people. For instance I have refrained from trying out my most hardcore Scots in Scotland because I seriously doubt it would be seen as a friendly act. But unlike Krashen, whose "conjecture is that accurate pronunciation in a second language, even in adults, is acquired rapidly and very well. We simply do not use our best accents because we feel silly", I see this as the result of a realization on my part of the imperfections in my Scots. I can't say it represent the dialect of any particular place in Scotland, and even the bulk of locals don't use the robertburnsean terms I have had the audacity to try out in my writings in my log. If everyone around me spoke in genuine Scots I might try, and my errors and my accent would then be taken for what they are, but in a mixed ambiance the interpretation could end up being the opposite, namely that I spoke deliberately bad Scots to make fun of them.
I feel something of the same problem with our own Danish dialects. I don't know any of them so perfectly that I would blend in, and if the genuine dialect speakers are a minority then it might be taken as an offence if I tried to speak their dialect and failed. Edited by Iversen on 15 January 2015 at 2:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5213 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 37 15 January 2015 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That's definitely an interesting one! I have plenty experience of the "output filter" as he describes it, where my fluency and accent become worse in situations where I feel less at ease or if I'm tired or for all sorts of other reasons, so I know it's a very real phenomenon.
However, both that paper and the Faber quote seem to imply that the output filter is the only or at least main obstacle, as if everyone is capable of speaking with a great accent and it's just a mental barrier that's stopping them from using that capability. From my own experience I'd disagree. I struggle to put on a foreign accent, be it to tell ethnic jokes or to speak another language, and trust me I've tried, for years. So I'll agree that removing the mental barrier helps you use your full ability, but that ability itself might not be great and also require work, as in my case. Otherwise I'd at least speak with a good accent when I'm alone and recording myself, even if not when I'm in the company of native speakers? The skill to imitate accents isn't one that everybody has. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6588 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 5 of 37 15 January 2015 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, the idea is that it's largely subconscious. It doesn't matter how hard you try, your brain is sabotaging your efforts. Considering the wealth of things that experimental psychology has found goes on in our brains of which we are unaware, it doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. That said, it might be formulated a bit strongly, but it rings true to me. Unfortunately it seems to be very difficult to test experimentally. But I think the biggest "Ah-ha" for me in this essay is the idea that nonnative accent isn't a bug, it's a feature. If it had been advantageous for our ancestors to keep the ability to acquire native accents into adulthood, it doesn't seem like a big cost for our brains to do so. It's not like having a large phonetic inventory is some big drain on mental resouces, as far as I can tell. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4539 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 6 of 37 15 January 2015 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am sure accents are used to mark group membership. We are strongly social creatures, much more so than our closest relatives chimpanzees, which actually come across as egotistical monomaniacal douchbags, when you read the literature.
There is a widespread belief that racism is an intrinsic part of our nature, in the sense that we can't but help think of ourselves as part of a group, and everyone else as outside it. We just lots of markers for this: clothing; sport affiliations (or lack); nationalism; skin colour; hair colour; accent etc etc. It makes perfect sense to me that accent may have evolved as a useful signifier of group membership. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5387 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 7 of 37 15 January 2015 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like the evolutionary approach to the question, but somehow, it feels like a posteriori reasoning.
While it's easy to argue that there is a benefit to a child sounding like her group, it's far too convenient to argue that the group is at an advantage if it can continue to mark an individual having learned the language as a potential threat having interests in another group -- after all, it could just as easily be argued, were accents easily acquired, that the individual capable of blending in is at an advantage and is more likely to be accepted by his new group. Accent may happen to be the last thing the average learner acquires to perfection (if at all), but if it were grammar or usage instead, we could simply argue that our ability to acquire grammar or usage is hampered for evolutionary reasons. Something has to be the last or most difficult thing we learn and I don't quite see the point in positing that it's got to be due to evolutionary benefits. Edited by Arekkusu on 15 January 2015 at 3:57pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4539 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 8 of 37 15 January 2015 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I believe that we have evolved a uniquely social mind that constantly looks for useful signs of group membership (e.g., clothes, music, etc).
It's also clear that accent is used as a in-group signifier. Think of upper vs lower class English accents; white-trash accents; South German vs North German accents etc etc. One of the worse aspects of German dubbing of English shows is that it tends to wipe-out all these subtleties (think Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the English librarian and the South Californian kids; The Wire with the totally different worlds (and words) between the Blacks and Whites etc). {But in contraction to what I said above - thanks Arekkusu!) However it doesn't logically follow that accents evolved to signify group differences, as it could equally plausibly be that once accents existed we latched onto them to them as useful signifiers of group difference. In the same way Europeans and Asians evolved lighter-colored skin to maximize Vitamin-D generation, but our (racist) brains then latched onto skin color as in-group/out-group signifier. Edited by patrickwilken on 15 January 2015 at 4:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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