Physics.org – Staff Writer
“Like all languages, English lays out many snares for the unwary non-native speaker, and Germans regularly fall foul of one in particular, pronunciation of ‘th’. A prominent recent victim was EU commissioner Günther Oettinger, who was often heard to begin his responses to reporters’ questions with the phrase “On ze one händ”. But you don’t have to have an especially high profile in the media to stumble at articulatory hurdles like this, as the majority of those who now use English well know. “Anyone who has ever learned a foreign language may, despite years of practice, continue to pronounce certain words incorrectly,” says linguist Dr. Eva Reinisch of LMU’s Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing. But why exactly is it so hard for people to speak a foreign language without betraying the accents of their native tongue? This is the question at the heart of the project on which a new Emmy Noether Junior Research Group at LMU, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, will focus over the coming years. The researchers plan to elucidate “the impact of auditory feedback on error monitoring and phonetic category representation in a second language”, to cite the exact title of the project. “What is paradoxical about this is that someone may have no difficulty recognizing an error in someone else’s pronunciation, while remaining unable to correct that same mistake in his own speech,” says Reinisch. The project hopes to shed light on the reasons for this asymmetry between perception and pronunciation. Two possible explanations suggest themselves. One is that auditory analysis of the phonetics of a foreign language is more complex than is generally assumed.”(more)