In my last post I wrote about native speakers not knowing that language learners are not fluent. I’ve experienced it many times when I have learned basic phrases in a language to be polite, and then have found myself apologising for not actually being able to speak the language.
So, is it beneficial for beginners to speak with a strong accent? It gives the listener an instant clue that the speaker is not a native, and they can then (hopefully) modulate their language to suit the speaker’s level. This saves you from having to explain that you are a student or that you don’t understand.
I’ve spoken to a few people about this, and opinions differ. Speaking slowly or with a strong accent may benefit the learner in that the listener will modify their speech, but you can’t speak too haltingly, or ‘incorrectly’, or you may not be understood at all. Most people don’t think that learners should actually try to speak with a strong accent (though some kind of accent is inevitable).
In the kind of news story that you wouldn’t even believe if it were in a Hollywood film, a woman from Devon started speaking in new accents after complaining of severe migraines.
She initially spoke in a Chinese accent for about a week, and then woke up speaking in a more Eastern-European sounding accent (apparent in the video below). Unfortunately there’s no evidence of the Chinese accent; I would have been really interested to see what that sounded like.
Clearly she has had some kind of brain episode affecting her speech areas, as she makes some grammatical errors as well as the perceived accent change. As she mentions in the video, she is unsure how long it will last for. Apparently some people who suffer this kind of change recover after some time.
It’s nice that her mental capacity seems unchanged, although I think it would frustrate me no end to have people think I was a bit simple because of the way I spoke!
I’ve talked about how people’s brains are continually trying to predict what’s going to come next, which is why we get misled by garden path sentences and sudden changes of direction.
A recent study of ERPs (Event-Related Potentials) by psychologist Jos J.A. Van Berkum from the Max Planck Institute in The Netherlands has shown that people’s brains show a specific spike (called the N400) when they hear a word that was unexpected or seems out of place. Interestingly, the research also showed that it’s not just the words being spoken or read that matter, but other information as well. As listeners, we also take into account clues from our perception of the speaker:
In addition to the words themselves, the person speaking them is a crucial component in understanding what is being said. Van Berkum also saw an N400 effect occurring very rapidly when the content of a statement being spoken did not match with the voice of the speaker e.g. “I have a large tattoo on my back” in an upper-class accent or “I like olives” in a young child’s voice. These findings suggest that the brain very quickly classifies someone based on what their voice sounds like and also makes use of social stereotypes to interpret the meaning of what is being said. Van Berkum speculates that “the linguistic brain seems much more ‘messy’ and opportunistic than originally believed, taking any partial cue that seems to bear on interpretation into account as soon as it can.”
The material used in the study was all in written or audio form, so there were no conclusions drawn about visual information about speakers. I don’t think it would be a huge jump to assume that we also take visual clues about speakers into account, though. It’s likely that we gather a lot of information about a speaker before they even open their mouth to talk. If they say something that doesn’t fit in with what we have assumed, it takes a moment to catch up again, much in the same way as it’s surprising to hear a tall, burly man speak with a high-pitched voice.
I’ve been working on an English pronunciation project recently, and we came up against the age-old (well, not really) question of American (AmE*) vs British (BrE*) English pronunciation. This particular project is required to use BrE, and the standard UK IPA symbols. I realised that if and when I need to create an AmE version, I will need to use a different set of phonetic symbols (notably for vowels), and teach some words in completely different ways. For example, AmE doesn’t really use the sound /ɔ:/ (the first syllable in the British ‘water’), but pronounces a whole lot more r’s than its British counterpart.
This led me to the question of choosing an accent. When you’re about to learn a new language, do you consider which dialect or accent you will be picking up, and will it matter in the future? Can the complete beginner even tell the difference? If you are learning English, should you pick a North American, European, or even Australasian accent? Apparently Canadian is the easiest to understand. If you’re learning French, do you want to speak like a Parisian or a Montrealer?
I know that when I was trying to improve my Cantonese, I preferred a Hong Kong accent to a country accent, and similarly I would rather have a Beijing or Shanghai accent than that of a small town that nobody’s ever heard of.
Of course this may sound like snobbery, but it basically boils down to increasing your chances of being understood. If you do your best to emulate a standard accent, people will be much more likely to understand you. I don’t think it matters if you choose American or British English, or American or European Spanish, as long as you try to learn a dialect that is commonly understood. If you go to a village an learn their particular accent and dialect, not only will you be an anomaly, but it will be much less likely that you will achieve the goal of learning a language - communication.
So if you’re making this sort of decision - just pick an accent and run with it.
*To prevent confusion, I am using American English to mean the standard or General American (GA) accent, and British English to mean a standard accent from England, sometimes referred to as BBC English or Received Pronunciation (RP). Not many people actually speak with either of these accents, but they are taken as a frame of reference. Please don’t leave me angry comments about how I should just call it English. English English is too confusing a term to use. As is Spanish Spanish.
I had the great pleasure of trying to place a collect call to Australia from the international airport in Bangkok (fairly impossible), and in the process I managed to stumble upon a curious detail in the automated voice system. Using that particular phone company, I could place a collect call to the USA, Canada, or the United Kingdom. The instructions were given for each country, and each set of instructions was given by a different recorded voice. They had gone to the trouble of finding a Canadian voice, an American voice, and an English voice to repeat very similar information.
The fact that they had gone to the trouble of finding differently-accented voice talents to record their messages (or maybe just the one voice talent, instructed to do three different accents) was both intriguing and annoying. Had they done any market research? Did it make people more likely to use their service if they heard a familiar accent on the other end of the line? Would people feel less stranded in a foreign country if they could relate better to the disembodied recorded voice? I would like to see the data.
Meanwhile, I wish that time and effort could have been spent opening up the service to more countries. Surely people pay enough money for collect calls to make it worthwhile?
August 4, 2008 at 10:00 am
· Filed under Accents, Games · Posted by Wendy
It hasn’t even officially been launched (just try to find a link on our homepage), but already the Accent Game has proved a huge success among those with a finger on the virtual pulse.
The makers of the game asked native and non-native speakers of English to read two lines of a poem, and now it’s up to you, the player, to determine where the speaker is from. If the excerpt was read by a native speaker, you also get the chance to earn bonus points by picking the city they come from.
Do you have a lot of friends from all over the world? Do you think you have what it takes to pinpoint an accent’s origin? The concept is deceptively simple, but the challenge itself can be a lot more difficult than you’d think. I got just over half of the countries the first time I played.
Give it a try, and then challenge your friends to do better!
If you enjoyed playing the game, think you have an interesting accent, and have a desire to participate in the next one (and potentially be world-famous!), upload a short video or audio file here, and we will let you know if you make the cut!
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