(I blog by sending myself emails when I have an idea. These emails are stored in a separate folder to think about later. Some ideas have gathered dust and I am cleaning them out.)
Bilingual kids have better pronunciation than those who acquire a second language as adults. I have read that this is because of specialization both in the brain and physically in terms of the kinds of sounds we are able to make. But I bet there is another reason: adults know how to read.
Take the hard ‘r’ sound in Spanish. It can be farily well approximated by an English ‘d’ sound which any English speaker has the wiring and hardware to make. But native Enlish speakers do not mispronounce ‘corazon’ by saying ‘codazon.’ Instead, they say ‘core a zone.’ And the reason is presumably that they have seen that word written out and the association between the written ‘r’ and the familiar sound has been highly reinforced. This is also a problem with most vowel sounds.
I would bet that adults would more easily learn fluency in another language if they were taught exclusively orally. Now it would seem that the obvious test case would be Chinese to English and vice versa. I don’t know but I would guess that it would not be possible to write English words phonetically using written Chinese. Despite this “advantage,” native Chinese speakers have a hard time with English fluency. Bad for the theory. But I think that Chinese to English is already too difficult for other reasons to consider this a good test. First of all the sound palettes are very different. Second, the rhythms of the languages are very different, even with good pronunciation.
Instead, to hold other factors constant, I would look to the blind. My guess is that the blind have a weaker association between pronunciation and the written language. (How much of a role does Braille play when a blind person learns a new language? ) The key prediction then would be that among native English speakers who learn Spanish as adults, the blind are more fluent.
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March 23, 2010 at 2:21 am
Andrew
There are too many confounding factors in the case of the blind – even if the blind show better pronunciation of second languages learned as adults, this could simply be because more of their brain power is directed toward auditory processing, rather than specifically because they can or can’t read. Maybe a better example is illiterate people?
March 23, 2010 at 5:23 am
Doug
My experience is that English speakers from the UK are much worse at pronouncing Spanish (despite many holidays in Spain), than are English speakers in the US. I think that British English speakers have a more restricted phoneme, so they can’t hear as well to correct their own pronounciation. In short, it’s the the ear, not the literacy.
March 23, 2010 at 11:10 am
Noto
How do you decide when to transfer from the inbox to the blog? Is it based on size of backlog? Or do you use the inbox as insurance for the days when you temporarily have writer’s block?
March 23, 2010 at 11:50 am
jeff
mostly i try to keep the most recent ones in my mind and think about them for a week or so during empty moments. if i can come up with a good way to write about it then i do. if not, they get buried by the incoming. to some extent they remain there as a buffer as you suggest.
March 23, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Niko
I think that it’s a mistake to correlate fluency (as it relates to language) with pronunciation. I have an excellent French accent, but a small vocabulary. I also don’t think that teaching anything exclusively orally would be a good solution, because there is a good chunk of the population who learn much better through reading and writing (auditory versus visual or tactile learners.) Indeed, the best solution would be to use tricks like your r = d. I also think that classes should either be divided by learning style, or learning style disabilities should be therapeutically corrected in more students, but that’s a totally different discussion.
March 25, 2010 at 8:22 am
Bilingual Audiobooks, A Learning Language Method For The Blind « (Not so) Daily French
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March 26, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Eric Wolff
I just want to know, is there any research whatsoever that supports your pronunciation theory? Because there’s a lot of research that supports that children’s brains are more receptive to language (and lots of other kinds of learning) than adult’s brains.
It seems to me you just kind of made this up out of whole cloth.
March 26, 2010 at 3:58 pm
jeff
yes. i totally made it up.
March 28, 2010 at 10:30 am
Francesca Maggi, Rome
My theory: Hang around little kids. They’ll usually pronounce pretty well, and will TOTALLY correct you when you mess up! I’ve been told ‘how badly I speak’ after 15 years in Italy!!!!! (It’s true).
FMaggi
http://www.upyourbottom.com
March 30, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Claire
There is a critical stage for language acquisition that has been researched in linguistics for over 50 years. Your theory would predict that adults learning a second language through an immersion method would be better than those who learn it from a book. That’s not true (there’s a lot of individual variation). Your theory would also have predictions about adult acquisition of languages with phonemic vs phonetic writing systems. Do L2 learners do better in Faroese than Danish? What about features of languages that aren’t written? Adults are pretty bad at lexical stress, but there’s no reading interference from that since it’s not written (to my knowledge in any major writing system).
It’s great you’re interested in linguistics, but unfortunately there’s a considerable body of research and evidence to the contrary.
April 28, 2010 at 8:05 pm
Besa Lighting
Very insightful stuff. It seems to me that younger kids are always going to outperform their parents when learning a second language.
May 6, 2010 at 10:32 pm
Claire Bait « Cheap Talk
[…] yes, I am just making this up. […]
May 7, 2010 at 4:30 pm
mike shupp
I’ve read somewhere that English has a larger stock of prepositions than most ofther languages; I note also that English does not use prepositions in places other languages do (We say things like “the boy’s school books” rather than “the books from school of the boy”).
So non-native speakers need to acquire something akin to a new set of instincts to speak ideomatic English. Not impossible, of course, but hard.
June 19, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Thoughts Left Lying Around « Cheap Talk
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June 21, 2011 at 11:46 pm
Jeff's wife
I believe that if you expose a person to language early on, they are able to pronounce that language correctly. As for Chinese, Jeff cannot distinguish the different intonation of a character while our kids can. Jeff is a lost case when it comes to learning Chinese. However, when one is fluent and able to pronounce the words correct will lose the intonation over time if one doesn’t use it often enough. Yes… in my case I am spotted as a foreigner in Taiwan. I don’t pronounce correctly in Taiwanese and Mandarin any more.