When my parents immigrated
to the United States in the 1990s, they knew little to no English. As years
went by, they improved their grammar and vocabulary—they knew the definitions
to most of my SAT vocabulary words, and even once corrected a grammar mistake
in one of my papers. Yet, I’ve still always found their English somewhat foreign.
Reading the
articles by Kenstowicz and Gussenhoven helped bring to light why I felt that
way. In his writing, Kenstowicz mentions that many phonetically-distinct words are
often pronounced the same, as in “tents” and “tends.” Yet, these subtle
linguistic conventions go unnoticed in normal conversations—that is, until
someone breaks the rule. In that sense, perception and context form a big part
of how we process language and spoken word. For example, only by experience
would we know that emphasizing the “the”
in the sentence “is this the answer” implies asking if something is the one and
only correct answer.
In Gussenhoven’s
research, Gussenhoven notes that Mandarin is a tone language, whereas English
is nontonal. In Chinese, the way a word is pronounced heavily effects the
meaning of the word. In English though, tone has no effect on the meaning—instead,
tone is used more to convey emotional information. As a result, Chinese
speakers who are not familiar with many of the intonation patterns may struggle
with producing fluid English. Even though a misplaced accent in Chinese is more
costly, perhaps completely distorting the meaning of a sentence, accent and intonation
in the English language is much more subtle and variable, making it hard to foreign
speakers pick up on.
Both articles
helped reveal the subtleties in spoken English, and provided insight on what exact
factors distinguish a native from a nonnative speaker. Interestingly, many of
these factors have to do with subconscious rules and unspoken conventions,
making the task of learning a foreign language an incredibly tall order.
I think that your comment on phonetic distinction is spot on. We take those conventions for granted until they are broken. Tone is such an important aspect of English, so your comparison of Chinese and English is very interesting. I can imagine it being very difficult for native Chinese speakers to convey their thoughts accurately in English, which makes me wonder if there is a certain way that this tonal discrepancy usually manifests itself in natural Chinese speakers.
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ReplyDeleteCatherine and Emily -- I agree with both of you. Understanding the subtleties of spoken English is crucial to developing a native-level grasp of our language, as described in Gussenhoven's paper. I find it interesting how tone has an effect on contextual meaning in Chinese compared to English's treatment of intonation as an element of emotion. This raises many questions in my mind. Do they teach intonation variation in Chinese-language classes for foreign speakers? How would a non-native speaker acquire these intonation skills? It makes me wonder, too, whether phonetic variation using the International Phonetic Alphabet should be taught in foreign-language classes to lessen the divide between native and non-native language speakers, as discussed in my blog post.
ReplyDeleteAs a native English speaker who lived a year in Beijing and learned Mandarin, I find the tones to be really interesting. They're one of the very first, if not the first, things a foreign speaker will learn. I would add that they're more than just contextual meaning; the tones are literally part of the pronunciation. Nonetheless, there are many characters that have identical pronunciation (equivalent to beer "can" and I "can" but also with the same tone) whose meaning must be inferred by the context. But in contrived situations the similarity between pronunciation can become difficult even for a native speaker to understand. For instance, there is a famous poem that only uses the syllable shi (pronounced sher, not shee) with varying tones. I was amazed that people could hear this poem and make sense of it, but my teacher said that even she would need to look at it in written form to make sense of it. A common problem for foreign speakers is to mix up intonation between the two languages, such as by raising one's voice at the end of a question in Chinese, which can have the unintended effect of literally changing the meaning of a sentence. This issue caused my parents to ask for a silken throne restaurant when they meant to ask for a dumpling restaurant! (oops)
ReplyDeleteWhile tones are certainly important, I think articulation is also very interesting, that by pronouncing the differences in allophones that distinguish different words, a speaker may sound non-native. This suggests that our perceptions of native, or non-accented speech, is itself an affected pronunciation system, as it does not necessarily correspond to how words are written or a logical system. Yet there is some flexibility within English speakers. I recently noticed that there is a split in how native English speakers pronounce the word "adult." Depending on where the stress is placed in the word, it can sound like "a dolt" or "add olt." Yet this difference in pronunciation is accepted as normal, while many mispronunciations by non-native English speakers immediately identify them as ESL. I do not know if it is a learned classification, or if there are some regional differences Americans have been exposed to for so long that they do not notice (for example, the "adult" split may be common, but the Midwestern "melk" is rare enough to be noticeable). But somehow, our expectations of what fluent speech immediately classifies one mispronunciation as a foreign accent, and another as just individual nuances in articulation.
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