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From: wales@CS.UCLA.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.ai,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Language Learning (acquiring native accents)
Message-ID: <9583@shemp.UCLA.EDU>
Date: Tue, 1-Dec-87 18:53:18 EST
Article-I.D.: shemp.9583
Posted: Tue Dec  1 18:53:18 1987
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References: <2360@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
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Reply-To: wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales)
Organization: UCLA CS Department, Los Angeles
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In article <2360@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> paul@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
(Paul W. Placeway) writes:

> Of those adults who have been in the new culture, certainly some do
> not ever learn all of the subtleties that comprise the local accent,
> and some do learn to perceive the differences, but do not learn how
> to produce them well.

> As far as phonemic discrimination, the study I cited does not show
> perfect results, but then again, 95% as good as natives in 3-4 weeks
> of training isn't all that bad, either.  I do not know if a similar
> study has been done for people who have had years of experience.
> Years of practice probably cover the remaining 5%, however...

Keep in mind that the standard of perfection is quite high.  An adult
trying to acquire a local accent well enough to "pass for a native"
needs to do a virtually flawless job, or else he will be found out.  No
matter how "good as native" that 95% of someone's speech may be, the 5%
that deviates from the local norm will stick out like a sore thumb in
the listener's ears.

A friend of mine -- a young man from Manchester, England -- recently
spent a couple of years in Kentucky and southern Ohio.  Upon his return,
he still spoke with the same Manchester dialect as he did before he left
-- but now with occasional slight traces of a Midwestern US accent.  Yet
he told me that, when he went home to England for a brief visit, every-
one back in Manchester claimed he sounded like an American!  (I assured
him, by the way, that he most definitely did not sound at all like an
American, and he was much relieved. :-})

What presumably happened was that his friends back home simply didn't
notice the "Manchester" components of his speech (since these were no
different from the norm as far as they were concerned), but the occa-
sional features from the American Midwest stood out very clearly.  If
my friend had visited another part of England, I suspect they would have
had no trouble identifying him as being from Manchester.

-- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department // +1 (213) 825-5683
	3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024-1596 // USA
	wales@CS.UCLA.EDU           ...!(ucbvax,rutgers)!ucla-cs!wales
"Sir, there is a multilegged creature crawling on your shoulder."