Fluency in
a foreign language is something I think about quite a bit. Since the fall of
2014, I have been studying French in an effort to give myself a little more
utility and mental elasticity as a traveler, global citizen, person who wants
to engage multiple cultures, yadda-yadda-yadda. And seeing as I was raised in a
monolingual household, I seemed to pick the language relatively quickly – I have
it on the authority of the French students and colleagues that I met in Paris
during my two quarter stint abroad that (1) my accent isn’t too shabby and (2)
that I handle myself pretty well in conversation (one very cute youngster I was
teaching English to said I was 75% fluent, whatever that means).
But I can’t
say that I’m fluent, because I don’t know where that cutoff lies. I used to
think it would be when I could speak indistinguishably from a Parisian local
(read: never), but I figured the more practical benchmark would be when I could
understand and express any situation, emotion, etc.
But I ran
into another roadblock: I would never be able throw whatever bit of “interpretation
influencing information” was embedded into my speech.
As
Professor Sumner details across her three articles chosen for this week’s blog
readings, the phonetic features of an individual’s speech serves as a mapping
from certain sound patterns to biases of perceived social characteristics and
in some cases to the efficiency and durability with which spoken information
from a certain speaker is understood and stored in memory.
As someone
who sees himself living and working abroad at some point in his life, what does
it mean, as exemplified in the study which analyzed association speed and
recall accuracy of GA, NY, and BE speakers, to be potentially less quickly
understood or to have what I say poorly recalled? How should does someone with
a foreign accent or regional dialect fit into the schema as introduced in the
study reflecting on word priming and association using speakers J and M; would
he be more narrowly perceived because his accent is anchored to certain social
characteristics, or more loosely perceived because his accent isn’t one with
which native speakers have much acquaintance?
If I were
to live and work abroad, these questions would be of great importance to me. To
navigate the social scene, I think it would be useful to know how someone with
my accent is perceived (coincidentally, most French people I asked could not
place it as American – likely due to their limited exposure to the only the
harshest American accent). Likewise, in a professional setting, I would want to
maximize the recall of what I say/present.
I would be
thus interested in hearing what non-native speakers of English have experienced
here in the US.
Thanks for this post John! I think your point about fluency is a fascinating one. That said, it seems to me too high a burden to put on a French speaker to expect them to have all the social cues of a French person in order to be fluent (see people from former French colonies who preusmably express different inherent cues, etc.). One interesting thing to me (as a Brit who regularly travelled around Europe as a child) is the extent to which people seem rapidly to internalize these cues: very basic conversational norms, sounds and reactions become second nature in a matter of days. So perhaps we already become ‘psychologically fluent’ more quickly than we would expect, although I do agree it plateaus out quite quickly and reaching an ‘authentic’ stage is likely to be tough.
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