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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 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 9 of 37 15 January 2015 at 6:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, I agree. It's hard to test, too. I wonder if one could make a prediction based on this?
The thing with accents, though, is that it's generally not learned at all. The accent you have when you start learning is improved somewhat with repeated listening, but pretty soon it stops, and though vocabulary and grammar keep improving, accent does not, in my experience. So I'm not sure I agree that it's the last thing to develop. So yes, I agree that it's hard to test. The "alcohol experiment" is somewhat indicative, but pretty peripheral. One thing that this conjecture would imply, though, is that the oft-suggested notion that we don't pronounce phonemes correctly because our brain can't "hear" the difference between the sounds in the target language and the ones in our native language is false. This should be testable in some way with brain scans, no? Or even with simpler tests, like seeing wether people hear the difference between the English and the French 't' sounds. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4536 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 10 of 37 15 January 2015 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been told that my English accent is pretty neutral, to the point where random Australians I've met don't know that I'm from Australia. However, when I hang out with an Australian my Australian accent comes back pretty quickly. I think this sort of accent mimicry also occurs with other English accents.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5769 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 37 15 January 2015 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
I profoundly dislike the entire "being selected against" argument of evolutionary psychology. From what I've observed I think there are people who are very good at entering new groups in their own culture or in other cultures, and there are people who are very bad at it. There are people who after years of living in a new area still have trouble with the local dialect, and there are others who pick up so much of the local language/dialect that locals are surprised when they find out the other person isn't a local. Some of this skill seems to be due to talent and personality, and some of it seems to be training. A second thing I more or less mentioned before is that an outsider who is obviously making an effort to fit in and who can contribute a set of skills, knowledge and experience nobody else has in the group is easier to deal with than somebody who seems to be group member by birth, but who makes weird, incomprehensible mistakes and is generally unpredictable and seems pretty dim. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 37 16 January 2015 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
This doesn't say anything, though. All you're saying is that some people are better than the average and others are worse. The only way this would not be true would be if everyone were exactly equally good. What's interesting to me is that learning a foreign language and speaking it without noticeable accent is extremely rare. Again, I don't think the evolutionary argument proves anythink. As Arekkusu points out, it's easy to figure out an evolutionary mechanism when you start with the answer. But the core of the evolutionary argument, in my mind, is this: When we ask ourselves "How come nature hasn't endowed us with X?", there are only really three possible answers: 1: It's too costly 2: There's no incrementally advantageous path that leads to it 3: It's not advantageous I don't see what the cost of making us able to learn languages without accent would be. And since we have the ability as children, I don't think number 2 hold up, either. So it seems to me that number 3 is the most reasonable answer. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 13 of 37 16 January 2015 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The cost is inventing a very hyperactive sensory system that can detect very small
differences in sound production very accurately and repeat them 100% of the time. Humans have very advanced sensory functions already. One of the things causing accent is that people are unable to distinguish between certain sounds whereas natives can. Learning how to distinguish new sounds is a process that people develop and have to get better at as they grow older. Your phonological palette tends to be established in childhood (which is why children tend not to have accents in their native tongue, or only compared to another subset of the population speaking that language). There is a very big investment required if you want every human being ever to perceive the differences between slightly more/less palatalized, different degrees of aspiration, voicing, exact production locus in the moth (uvular? velar? postvelar? glottal?). To be able to distinguish all of that, all of the time, you need seriously advanced sensory apparatuses - stuff humans can't do. They can only learn to produce a subset initially and add as they go. The question of advantage is another role - usually poor accents may have social consequences (think of someone speaking Swedish with a broken accent and getting a reply in English, especially in countries where bilingualism is common), but there's very little difference between natural speech with no accent (a native) and a light, hard-to-detect accent (non-native). In this case the small differences in production fall within the allophonic regions for that sound in a certain language's phonological system, or not so far outside of it that it causes semantic problems. Edited by tarvos on 16 January 2015 at 2:56pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5769 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 14 of 37 16 January 2015 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, but - simply being "not advantageous" does not mean something has to be disadvantageous. Being selected against implies disadvantage. That was my point. And then I mentioned that there might be an advantage to not picking up a native accent, but that it's probably not a clear-cut distinction, because people work with whatever knowledge they have in whatever situation they find themselves in. Of course it doesn't say a lot, because I only have anecdotes to work with. Your answer to point two can be argued. You said that there is a pathway to it, which is correct, but you forget to consider the question: Is it incrementally advantageous? I wonder, why should being able to emulate the accent of a foreign group be incrementally advantageous? What I meant to say is that it might even be disadvantageous, because when you emulate the accent of that group you have to emulate the rest of the "culture" at a similar pace as your accent develops, you have to learn all the common knowledge shared by group members and create a place for yourself within the group structure, things that existed in our species before we had the kind of language we have nowadays. If your skill set is too lopsided compared to the native group members you can't act as a productive member of your new group. And even if you can do that you have to be able to (permanently or temporarily) suppress the knowledge and skills that link you to a different group while you're acting in the current group, and that is where we get back to the first point: It's very costly. But if you fail doing that you'll mess up the communication within the group, and that may turn out disastrous to yourself, and possibly to the group as a whole or certain members close to you. Apart from that, as long as we're dealing with tribal and rural cultures the other group members -at least those who aren't considerably younger than you- will remember that you weren't born into the group. Cultures with groups as large as ours aren't all that old, after all. If you're living in a big group, being able to pass as a group member by birth is possible, and then it might be advantageous. But while a few humans did live in such a big group, in a city, even 400 generations ago, right now only half of the world population do live in cities. At the turn of the 20th century - 4,5 generations ago - that was only 15%, if you go back another 8 generations it was about 2%. I remember reading that it takes about 40 generations for our skin colour to adapt to a climate with different sun intensity, and that people whose families have lived in the areas of ancient cities for a long time have certain adaptations in their immune system. I don't know if looking in the same populations for a better ability to learn accents would make sense, because the selective pressure from too much sun exposure or from tuberculosis surely affects many more people with more dirct consequences that than that from the ability of passing as a native speaker when you were not raised in a certain group. Edited by Bao on 16 January 2015 at 2:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 15 of 37 16 January 2015 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've heard this argued before but never seen any evidence for it. [quote]To be able to distinguish all of that, all of the time, you need seriously advanced sensory apparatuses - stuff humans can't do.[/quoe] Except that, as you point out, children do this all the time, and their sensory apparatus is hardly more advanced than that of adults. The fact that all children can distinguish all of these sounds means that it's obviously humanly possible, and I don't see what high cost the children are paying for it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| anamsc2 Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 4562 days ago 85 posts - 186 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan, German Studies: French | Message 16 of 37 16 January 2015 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, I believe there's quite a bit of evidence for this in the literature. It's not really my field, but here's a relevant paper that found that English-speaking adults were unable to distinguish /k/ and /q/. I know I've heard of another study that found that English speakers were able to distinguish some sounds (I believe it was types of alveolar stops) when they were told that they were water dropping in a bucket but not when they were told that they were speech sounds, but I couldn't find that paper. Here's an abstract for a more recent paper showing that speakers of non-tonal languages lose the ability to distinguish tones by 9 months (although I didn't read the whole paper). This is not to say, though, that non-native speakers can't learn to distinguish between two sounds. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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