Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: n7420257@henson.cc.wwu.edu (Paul Tholfsen)
Subject: Re: Accent Elimination
Message-ID: <1994Dec21.054134.19618@henson.cc.wwu.edu>
Sender: news@henson.cc.wwu.edu (USENET-WWU)
Organization: Western Washington University
References: <9412182335.AA03517@newt.phys.unsw.edu.au> <42876@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 1994 05:41:34 GMT
Lines: 61






>>> Does anyone know where one might go to get rid of a foreign accent? My 
>>>mother came to this country at an age when learning a new language is not 
>>>too easy, and now she speaks with a noticeable Russian accent.  Are there 
>>>special classes for this, and if there are, how do I find out about them?
>
>>>-Larisa Migachyov
>
>   There also exist English accent correction tapes for native speakers
>of various foreign languages.  See the Accent English tapes in the
>AudioForum catalog; I looked and they do in fact have tapes for native
>Russian speakers.  I have not tried them myself and don't know how good
>they might me.  (My problem is exactly the opposite; I am a native English
>speaker trying to learn good Russian accent.)
>

The elimination of a foreign accent is much trickier than it might seem at
first.  It's more than simply mimicking a native speaker.  A serious
problem which most adults face is that their perception of speech sounds
has been conditioned by their native language.  The result is that many
simply do not, or cannot hear the subtle differences in sound which result
in an accent.  This was brought home to me forcefully in a course I recently
attended in German phonetics (my native language is English).  

One of the first things we did was take a speech perception test, as follows:
We listened to a tape of a native German speaker reading a series of two
syllable words.  All were of the form b$ten where the $ was alternately
different German vowels.  Thus, using German orthography, the words might
be written baten, bieten, bueten, batten, botten, boeten, bitten, etc..

All we had to do was select which of the 15 vowels had been spoken in each
word.  The results were astonishing.  The test has been given to thousands
of students over the years with these results:  

Native Germans                   97% (92 - 100%)
Graduate Students in German      73% (60 - 83%)
Third Year Students of German    58% (22 - 81%)
Students with one year of German 45% (13 - 77%)

The point is, that just as people can be colorblind, it seems that many
(most?) adults have some degree of impaired speech sound perception.
What this means is that in addition to the problems of mimicking the
foreign sounds, adults will likely not even hear, or otherwise be
aware of the differences.













