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The Accent Conjecture | ||
Tags: Language Acquisition Theory | Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4668 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 17 of 37 16 January 2015 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That's interesting, especially the bit about the place of articulation. Yet I bet if you asked many English monoglots to imitate an "Indian accent," they would start speaking with retroflex T and D...
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| 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 18 of 37 16 January 2015 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Interesting! Thank you for that link. Of course, as you point out, this doesn't mean that they can't learn. If speakers who have learned a language as adults and speak with an accent still have this problem, one would expect it to cause problems with listening comprehension. To prove that this listening problem is an issue in foreign accents, one would have to do a similar experiment but with fluent second-language speakers who speak with an accent. Do they, too, have problems distinguishing between these sounds? If so, we should expect that accent and listening comprehension are correlated. 1 person has 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 19 of 37 16 January 2015 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
Their sensory apparatus is not more advanced. However the sounds you learn in childhood determine your initial allophonic boundaries, and they are harder to overcome later (but you certainly can - I learned how to roll my r's at age 22, for example, and I did not distinguish the uvular and alveolar trill. I always produced uvular sounds in that position in Dutch, because both trills are allophonic and both possible realizations for /r/ (and in coda you can add a retroflex). The point is that it will take effort and lots of conscious application and production as an adult to learn to produce certain phonemes (some are easier than others; for example, moving from /k/ to /g/ is easy, but /q/ is a relatively rare phoneme and thus harder to distinguish, but necessary if you are learning Arabic for example). Because most people have relatively close sounds in their native inventory when learning a certain language, they substitute that phoneme, which causes the accent. In order to overcome the phoneme barrier you have to learn to both produce the "new" phoneme, distinguish it from the sounds you already know and learn to apply it contextually, and that takes effort. Children don't have to do this as much, because they're still establishing what phonological boundaries work naturally in their environment (or environments, if you grow up bilingually like I did - I can also effortlessly produce all the English sounds). The other part of accent is intonation, melody and contouring (suprasegmental features) and those are much harder to train - I've heard people that speak English or Dutch with the correct phonemes but they still sound off because of the way they stress sentences. This is something I tend to try and listen to a lot of speech to and mimic/impersonate, but that's not something I can particularly advise people on how to train that exactly. So yes, there is a cost involved in learning this. Of course, many people have learned phonemes as adults. But this is what causes the stereotypical problems. Edited by tarvos on 16 January 2015 at 6:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5384 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 20 of 37 16 January 2015 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
If cost in indeed the issue, then perhaps only those inclined or able to mimic all of the cultural or societal references associated with the language tend to think that cost is worthwhile. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| NewLanguageGuy Groupie France youtube.com/NewLangu Joined 4610 days ago 74 posts - 134 votes Speaks: English* | Message 21 of 37 16 January 2015 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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All very scientific. I prefer simple terms. In terms of accent (foreigners learning French) I come across three
groups: - Those who refuse to speak with a native like accent because they are afraid of sounding stupid (already mentioned) - Those who are simply tone deaf and cannot identify the differences in sounds - Those who see no value in aiming for a native-like accent and speak in there own accent I don't think cost really comes into it - if you have a native teacher and a tuned ear, you can easily imitate him/her. 1 person has 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 22 of 37 16 January 2015 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
Cost-benefit relationships always play a part in this kind of decision. Putting work in accent over grammatical accuracy or vocabulary can be a tradeoff. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4524 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 23 of 37 17 January 2015 at 1:16am | IP Logged | |||||
Easy for whom? The phonological voiced/voiceless contrast in plosives is quite tricky because of different phonetic realizations in different languages. VOT, aspiration and lenis/fortis might all play a role here, depending on the language. You do not need to go far to find challenging differences: the language pair French - German for example. Those Frenchmen don't even know their own capital. They think it's called "Bari". ;) My point is: phonological differences (ie. discriminatory features) are language specific. This makes the whole stuff even harder. My German /y:/ is not the same thing as the Norwegian /y:/ despite the same symbol. My German /p/ is defined by different phonological features than the French /p/ (French probably doesn't even have a feature called aspiration). We don't have a universal way of describing phonemes. We have the IPA for phonetics with a more or less universal definition of the symbols as long as you use enough diacritics to be exact. Phonological descriptions of languages often make use of those symbols too, but they redefine them to match the range of sounds in the language in question. This makes different phonological descriptions incomparable, which language learning books often completely ignore. Edited by daegga on 17 January 2015 at 1:24am 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 24 of 37 17 January 2015 at 1:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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They are. But you can mark aspiration and such easily in an IPA chart. I know that many
languages don't distinguish /k/ and /g/, but only have aspirated and non-aspirated stops (Chinese, Korean, Icelandic), do away with one of the phonemes altogether (Dutch) or have an aspirated voiceless stop contrast with a non-aspirated, voiced one (German, English, Swedish and so on). Anyway, I was talking about pure plain stops, no funny things going on. In principle a plain /k/ and a plain /g/ are common enough. Especially /k/ is found in nearly every language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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