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91精品黑料吃瓜 research shows you can鈥檛 rely on pronunciation as a measure of linguistic proficiency.
A bilingual鈥檚 鈥渁ccent鈥 is a poor indicator of how well they master a language, according to a new 91精品黑料吃瓜 study.
Shana Poplack, Distinguished University Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Linguistics, PhD student Suzanne Robillard and Nathalie Dion, Research Coordinator at Poplack鈥檚 , all at the University of Ottawa, together with John Paolillo, Associate Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, investigated the relationship between the structure of language mixing and its phonetic realization 鈥 in other words, the way it鈥檚 pronounced.
鈥淭he results of this research, which we鈥檝e been conducting over the last several years, provide evidence that the way someone sounds when they鈥檙e speaking a language is no reflection of their mastery of word formation or sentence structure (grammar),鈥 explained Shana Poplack.
From a massive 3.5 million-word corpus of the spontaneous speech of a random sample of 120 French-English bilinguals in Canada鈥檚 national capital region, the researchers pinpointed the speakers with the greatest proclivity for mixing languages.
They homed in on how those speakers pronounced certain consonants that exist in English, but not in French in a variety of different contexts. These included the 鈥渢h鈥 sound in words like THough and THanks, the 鈥渉鈥 in Horn, the 鈥渞鈥 in factoRies, and the 鈥減鈥, 鈥渢鈥 and 鈥渒鈥 sounds in contexts where they are normally pronounced with a burst of air in English (like P(h)olluted).
Since only speakers who were found to be capable of producing these sounds in both languages were included in the study, the assumption was that they would pronounce the words in tandem with the way they treat them grammatically: in the French fashion when actually incorporating them into French (i.e. what linguists call 鈥borrowing鈥), but in English when code-switching to longer stretches of that language.
Instead, they discovered that the phonetic form language mixing takes is much more chaotic. Code-switches to English regularly failed to force English-style pronunciation, while borrowings from English 鈥 including those attested for centuries in French-language dictionaries (like bar) 鈥 are often still pronounced English-style rather than in French.
This result, coupled with the facts that both people鈥檚 accents and the words they borrow are so noticeable, all conspire to exaggerate the actual frequency of code-switching in bilingual speech.
鈥淭his kind of alternation among sounds from both languages, which is typical of 鈥渁ccents鈥 everywhere, only reinforces the stereotype that bilinguals don鈥檛 speak any language properly,鈥 said Dr. Poplack. 鈥淏ut listeners often get so carried away by the way someone sounds that they may overlook their native-like grammar.鈥
By exposing the fallacy of relying on pronunciation as a measure of linguistic proficiency, this research reminds us that if you rely on a person鈥檚 accent, you may be sorely misjudging how well they speak a language.
The article will be published in volume 96.1 (March 2020) of Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America.
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