Growing up in an
international household exposed me to three different languages on a daily
basis: English, Spanish, and Czech. English is my native language, with Spanish
coming in at a close second. Czech was introduced by my stepmom later in my
childhood so I’m not very fluent in Czech at all, although I do understand a little
bit. I remember when I first learned how to count to ten in Czech. I could
pronounce almost every number fairly well, except for the number ‘four,’ which
translates to ‘čtyři’ in Czech. The pronunciation for this word is actually
very difficult, mainly because of the sound of the letter ‘ř’ in the word. The
Czech letter ‘ř’ is actually a [ r ] and a [ ʒ ] on top of each other. According to my
stepmom, this sound is distinctly Czech and it is usually the last sound that
Czech children and foreign learners are able to master, which explains my
inability to successfully pronounce ‘čtyři.’ Although I’ve always been able to
produce the sound [ r ], I still, to this day, am unable to add the [ ʒ ] sound on top of it and pronounce the
Czech letter ‘ř.’ Most likely, this isn’t the only sound that I wouldn’t be
able to pronounce perfectly if I were to attempt to speak Czech. Everyone who
isn’t a native speaker of a language has a foreign accent in that language,
unless years of training are undertaken to learn the accent of a native speaker.
What is it that makes mastering pronunciation of a new language so difficult
and how can we teach pronunciation in a more effective manner?
According
to Mohammad Ahmadi, author of “English Language Teaching,” the difficulty of
learning how to pronounce a foreign language isn’t really physical; it’s more
cognitive. As a speaker of a second language, a person fully knows that it is
physically possible to pronounce the words correctly. The problem lies in the person
applying habits of pronunciation in their native language to the second
language they are trying to learn. So in order to learn how to pronounce words
correctly, a person doesn’t need to necessarily see how they are pronounced.
Instead, the learners need ways of categorizing the sounds appropriately to the
second language. Ahmadi suggests that seeing a speech wave or a diagram of the
articulation of a certain sound won’t help a person with pronunciation at all.
He says, “Since people generally think about sounds in terms of their auditory
quality, rather than directly in terms of their articulation or acoustics, the
key is to find ways of describing the auditory quality of sounds that makes
sense to the learner.” He also points out that there are some linguists that
believe that a person must begin learning a language before the age of seven to
ever attain a native-like pronunciation. However, more recent research has
shown that environment and motivation of the learner can lead to development of
native-like pronunciation and age may not play as big a role as was previously
thought.
What do
you think? Does age play a huge role or is it possible for an adult to learn
proper pronunciation of a second language?
Also, do
you have an experience with a second language and if so, how is pronunciation difficult
for you?
I agree with Mohammad Ahmadi and your blog post that it is not the difficulty of physically pronouncing the words of a foreign language but changing one’s cognitive mindset that prevents one from pronouncing the language correctly. The practice of applying habits of pronunciation in one’s native language to a second language is applicable to Hawaiian Pidgin. In the sugarcane fields during the 19th and 20th century, immigrant workers from across the globe had to find a way to communicate with each other and with English speakers. The result was a version of simplified English called Hawaiian Pidgin that contained a mixture of vocabulary from the different languages spoken in the fields. Another feature of pidgin was that the immigrant workers tried to speak English using the grammatical structures of their native languages and utilizing the pronunciation of sounds from their native languages. Check out my blog posts for examples if you are interested. As Ahmadi describes, this difficulty is possibly due to the loss of the distinction of certain sounds around the age of seven, which makes it difficult to pronounce sounds in foreign languages not found in one’s native language. As for learning Spanish as a second language, I made a conscious effort to have an authentic Spanish accent, which paid off because my native Spanish-speaking friends here at Stanford compliment my accent.
ReplyDeleteI believe it is certainly possible for an adult to learn proper pronunciation of a second language, albeit much more difficult. While I do not seek to discredit the effect of attitudes on "proper" or authentic pronunciation, I differ from Austyn in that I think some of the challenge in producing foreign pronunciations does stem from the physical. Although the physical limitations are not insurmountable, they certainly influence our ability to learn a new accent. One example of this is the learning of click dialects. One can understand and have a great mindset about learning the language, but mastery of the click sound requires physical manipulations that may be more difficult as time goes on, albeit not impossible. Needless to say, mindsets are important to pronunciation as they are to most endeavors in life, but so is physical ability.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting topic because I have always heard about how hard it is to learn a new language as you get older. Do I think it's impossible? The optimist in me would argue that no, I think it IS possible to learn a new language and its pronunciation at an older age. Yet, I think it would take longer because learning a new language when you are older is inherently different than when you are young. For starters, you are at a different stage developmentally. Not only that, but when you are learning another language later on, you are heavily influenced by the language you already speak. You are influenced by the grammar, the sounds, and accent. Like Aaron said, I do think part of it is physical. Your mouth is not accustomed to making certain sounds and it may take a longer time to master those.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I agree that there is a difficulty in eliminating accents, I have to disagree with the notion that it is impossible. If you take into account professionals who dedicate their lives to international relations, you find an extraordinary pool of people who can communicate often flawlessly with a vast range of cultures through their language. Furthermore, I do believe that there is some biological innate predisposition to adapt the vocal and auditory tracts for better speaking/listening.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up in a similar setting where I was constantly exposed to a myriad of languages I find this question extremely relatable and interesting. I do find that age is extremely important in establishing a native accent. Personally, I grew up in Brazil when I was very young and even though now I sometimes forget vocabulary, I am still able to produce an almost perfect accent when I speak Portuguese. On the other hand, my parents learned Portuguese later in life so although they managed to acquire an extensive vocabulary, they, nonetheless, always had a thick accent that always made them stand out as native Spanish speakers. Thus, while I do believe eliminating accents is extremely difficult, especially if the language is learned in adulthood, I do not believe it is impossible. Actors frequently spend months learning an accent and are able to produce indistinguishable performances to that of a native speaker.
ReplyDeleteYou bring up a really interesting point about accents being a mental rather than a physical difficulty. I think this relates to the concept of phonemes: that a variety of sounds are, on a mental level, seen as the “same” by a speaker. Each language has a different set of phonemes, but often has overlaps or orthographic similarities with other languages. This can cause speakers of one language to apply phonemic rules of their native tongue to the foreign language they’re speaking, resulting in mispronunciations and accented speech. For example, in English the letter “r” is typically pronounced [ɹ] while it is typically pronounced [r] in Portuguese. Therefore, a common mistake for English-speakers is to substitute the alveolar r for the flap when speaking. This is not a physical difficulty as [r] exists in the English language, but mental in that English-speakers’ conceptions of the phoneme /r/ is the sound [ɹ].
ReplyDeleteI have a close friend from back home that grew up speaking English and Mandarin- when she was young, her parents were some of the only people that could understand her mish mash of Mandarin and English.
ReplyDeleteAt home, she speaks mostly Mandarin. Even when I would visit her house, she would speak to her parents almost exclusively in Mandarin. In school, with me, with her other friends, she speaks in English. When speaking English, she has no discernible accent at all. Meanwhile, when she visits family in Taiwan, she is apparently always teased for sounding "American".
This was always so strange to me because she regularly speaks both languages (with her parents being native speakers), but her only “foreign” accent is when she speaks Mandarin. To me, her Mandarin sounds much better than most of my other friends who speak it as a second language, but her family in Taiwan don’t completely accent it.
I’ve always wondered if it would be possible for her to speak Mandarin “well enough” for her family (without extensive study). How much harder is it that the other language is Mandarin as compared to something like that has sounds closer to English?
I think you bring up an intersting point about age. I agree that it is easier to learn to make new sounds at a young age then when you are older. However, I think the reason for this is mostly pyscological rather than physical. People born speaking Czech and people born speaking english are anatomically the same. There is no reason that it would be possible for one set of people to make a specific sound and not the other. Further, I disagree with Ahmadi's argument that you cannot learn to make sounds by considering the manner and place of articulation. I think this is one of the only ways to accurately describe how to make a new sound that doesn't rely on the speaker already hearing a distinction between the two sounds. I think the reason it is harder for adults to make new sounds is because they are resistant to rely only on knowledge of place and manner of articulation. Further, they already have the idea in their minds that they can't make the new sounds and therefore it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
ReplyDeleteI do think it's possible to learn a new language and attain a level of pronunciation similar to or on par with a native speaker, but I also think that's much harder than becoming fluent in a language. The topic of proper pronunciation is also interesting, because I think what sometimes creates an accent is improper pronunciation. This is evident in the US where many different accents of English exist, yet not all of them would be described as American. Speaking English with perfect pronunciation might still stick out in a weird way in a lot of places here, making it even harder for someone trying to achieve speaking without a noticeable accent. In a place like the US with so many different accents, I'm not sure if there is an ideal sound or lack of accent to aim for with English.
ReplyDeleteI definitely believe age plays a huge role when learning to speak a new language and how to pronounce certain sounds found in that language. My own experiences can attest to this. When I moved to the United States from Brazil at the age of ten, I had a lot of difficulty in pronouncing and noticing certain sounds that are not used in Portuguese but are used in English. I remember being confused during my 5th grade English class when on a spelling quiz, I had to differentiate between the words “fund” and “fond”. But after some months, this was no longer a problem. However, for my brothers (who are much older than I am) and my parents, who knew how to speak English before we moved, this was not the case. While my accent became lighter, theirs remained mostly unchanged.
ReplyDeleteWhen I studied Italian in high school, there was this one teacher whose accent was noticeably different than my other professors. Her speech seemed affected or Americanized when compared to my teacher who was born in Puglia, Italia. While I believe that it’s more difficult to acquire proper pronunciation skills as an adult, I do think that the fault is not in the age of the learner but the way the learner is taught. Maybe if more people used IPA when learning languages or even listened more than reading, proper pronunciation would come more naturally to adults trying to learn a second language.
ReplyDeleteResearch has shown that the age of arrival, i.e. immersion, has a greater effect on language proficiency, over the age of exposure (http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/newport/pdf/Johnson_NewportCogPsy89.pdf). Taking this into account, I think it’s very informative that some people are very fluent in English, yet still retain some characteristic “accent” as part of their speech patterns. I have noticed that some languages make it easier for adaptation, rarely noticing an accent among many speakers of Germanic or Scandinavian languages, for example. Moving into English from other, more distant languages, which have a more disparate phonological vocabulary from English, may make the accent persist regardless of age of exposure (Hebrew and Chinese come to mind). Still, it’s interesting to note that some languages, including Spanish, have characteristics that some people physically cannot produce (the rolled r, for instance), a problem that I have personally experienced. Learning how to pronounce words in Spanish in a way that is correct, impeded by my English phonetic vocabulary and limited phonetic palate, is something I continue to work and improve on.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think that an ability to pronounce an accent is so much correlated with age, but more with 1) what you first language is and 2) how good of an ear you have for nuances of other languages.
ReplyDeleteEach language has its own set of sounds and no language (as far as I’m aware) uses every sound. Therefore, it would stand to reason that it would be easier to pronounce an accent in a language similar to your own because you already have many of the sounds from that language in your repertoire. A native Spanish speaker would probably find Italian pronunciation much easier than, say, a native Chinese speaker.
And then it comes down to individual people and their ability to differentiate and mimic sounds. Both of my parents speak only English, but my mom has a much better ear for accents. Whenever we travel, they will each, at some point, try to tell a taxi driver the name of a tourist site, restaurant, or hotel. The taxi drivers will, every time, understand my mom but give my dad a blank look entirely lacking comprehension. My mom can hear and replicate nuances of accents quite well; my dad cannot, and this has nothing to do with their ages.
I have to agree on some points with Griffin - I don't necessarily think age is the differing factor in accents. It does affect language learning, and there are definitely some cools studies on how age makes it so much harder to learn another language.
ReplyDeleteAccents are fascinating though - they grow within dialects as well. Does that mean differing english speakers can't say the same sounds as others? Am I missing a sound that a Southern person could speak because I grew up in California?
I'd love to find out.
When you try to learn a new language, it helps that this new language is phonetically similar to your native language. For example, as an Italian speaker, speaking Spanish without an accent is a lot easier. Even though this is the case, we've seen that a lot of languages with great overlap in their sounds are still hard to speak without an accent.
ReplyDeleteLooking at sounds (think: IPA chart) independently is less useful here, I think. Although languages can have completed overlap in the types of sounds they use, the combinations of sounds will be different. That is where accents come in.
I think it would also be interesting (if not a little off-topic) to consider why people do not strive harder to eliminate their accent. Is it possible that having an accent puts a specific label on you that can be useful in certain situations. Does it not set you apart?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've observed in my time tutoring young and adult native Spanish speakers to learn English, I have to agree that the obstacles that come in the way of attaining a native speaker's accent are cognitive instead of physical. It's difficult, for example, for a Spanish-speaking adult to learn how to pronounce [θ], written as "th" in English, and commonly pronounced as [t] or [d] by Spanish speakers. To help them pronounce this sound, at first I would show them how I would place my tongue in between my lips and blow out to make the sound, which they would only be able to produce when I showed them how to do so. However, when I told them to imagine they were pronouncing a "z" like Spaniards would, which is known to be a [θ] sound, they would reproduce the sound more readily and more often. In other words, though they were fully capable of producing the sound, it took tapping into their prior knowledge of Spanish to solidify a link between "th" and [θ]. Unfortunately this is not the case for all the phonemes in English (the [ɹ] sound is very difficult to teach, for example), but at least it goes to show that the hurdles that come in the way of achieving accent fluency in a language are more cognitive than physical.
ReplyDeleteThere are many controversies regarding the degree of correlation between age and accent-acquisition. Many researchers believe that at a young age is when one develops a native accent. However, as many have commented about in some way, I think the reason accents are so easily developed at a young age is due to the fact that cognitive development is fastest at primal stages of growth, which would explain why children may acquire an accent so quickly. In addition, similar to how research has shown learning becomes more difficult after some critical point in our life cycle, perhaps there will eventually be research indicating that though not impossible, there is a critical period after which accent-acquisition becomes significantly more difficult.
ReplyDeleteYour questions are excellent and go the heart of the challenge of learning a foreign language and accent as an adult. When we are children learning our native tongue (or tongues for those in dual language households), we don't interact with the world with a series of questions. We're usually preoccupied with only one: HOW? "How can I talk like mommy and daddy so I can be understood?" From there, intense immersion and mimicry begin resulting in perfect fluency complete with accent. I know people who were raised in dual language households who speak perfect Englsh and French, or English and Croatian with the appropriate accents. If adults wish to master fluency in a language including its accent, a similar form of surrender must take place. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult not to over-analyze ourselves as we learn a language. Becoming a child again when you're a full grown adult is virtually impossible. I've studied three languages fairly intensely. The way I was able to tackle the accent challenge was through child like surrender to mimicry and immersion. It's just that easy; its just that hard.
ReplyDelete