An Aptitude for Speech: The Importance of Mimicry Ability in Foreign Language Pronunciation

Hinton, Martin

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-24019-5_8

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…They refer in particular to a well-known study by Purcell and Suter (1980) which was actually a reassessment of Suter's earlier work, and found only L1 to have a greater influence on accentedness than mimicry skill. A similar pattern has also been found repeatedly in my own work (Hinton 2013).…”

Section: Factors Affecting Pronunciationsupporting

confidence: 89%

The Bold and the Beautiful: How Aspects of Personality Affect Foreign Language Pronunciation

Hinton

2014

RiL

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This paper reports on a study into the inter-relationships amongst foreign language pronunciation, mimicry ability and a range of personality and attitudinal factors. It will begin with a brief review of studies into affective influences on pronunciation ability (Arnold 1999, Hu & Reiterer 2009) and research into the importance of mimicry talent (Jilka 2009; Piske, MacKay & Flege 2001). This will be followed by a short description of a pilot study carried out prior to the main experiment. In the main study, a group of Polish learners of English completed a number of mimicry tasks in three languages: Italian, Dutch and Chinese, as well as a narration task in English. Mimicry performance and English pronunciation were then assessed by native speakers and compared. Participants also completed a questionnaire concerning their feelings about the languages they were to mimic and a second questionnaire designed to detect affective factors such as language learning anxiety, as well as attitudes towards the pronunciation of Polish and English. The pilot study suggested that the perceived attractiveness of the foreign language to be mimicked did not affect the performance of most participants, and that mimicry skill was fairly constant across languages. However, those who were particularly concerned about their personal appearance showed greater fluctuation in their ability to mimic and their performance appeared to be influenced by their attitude towards the language. This is referred to by the author as the Cecily effect. That study also confirmed the results of my previous experimental work showing that mimicry skill is correlated to some degree with English language pronunciation and that both pronunciation and mimicry are negatively affected by high levels of anxiety. The main study sets out to investigate whether or not these conclusions hold true for a larger sample population and also seeks to determine the effect of confidence and willingness to take risks on scores for both foreign language pronunciation and mimicry exercises.

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Section: Factors Affecting Pronunciationsupporting

confidence: 89%

The Bold and the Beautiful: How Aspects of Personality Affect Foreign Language Pronunciation

Hinton

2014

RiL

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“…Several pronunciation phenomena have received little more than passing mention in L2 speech research. One such area is voice quality, which has been cited for decades as potentially important for L2 speech (Esling & Wong, 1983;Honikman, 1964), yet the literature on this topic remains paltry.…”

Section: New Avenues For Pronunciation Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

A prospectus for pronunciation research in the 21st century

Munro

Derwing

2015

JSLP

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This inaugural issue of theJournal of Second Language Pronunciation,an auspicious step forward in our field, gives us an opportunity to take stock of current trends in pronunciation research with an eye to the future of this evolving field. As longtime researchers, we have learned many lessons by trial and error and wish to share our perspectives on sound methodological practices and on pitfalls to avoid. Our review follows the outline of a traditional experimental investigation, starting with the conceptualization of pronunciation research studies. We then discuss theoretical motivations, choice of constructs, and issues arising from the literature review. Next we compare several research designs and summarize types of data commonly used in pronunciation research. We then move on to consider data collection and analysis, focusing on reliability, effect sizes, and speaker variability, and to offer some caveats regarding the interpretation of results. We conclude by suggesting areas for future second language speech research, in terms of both replications and new studies.

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“…Findings in this line of research revealed the existence of considerable individual differences in pronunciation learning abilities arising from the influence of various factors. For instance, working memory capacities (Papagno et al, 1991; Rota and Reiterer, 2009), empathy (Hu et al, 2012), mimicry ability (Reiterer et al, 2011; Hinton, 2013) and musical expertise (see for example, Slevc and Miyake, 2006; Oechslin et al, 2010) all constitute strong predictors of pronunciation learning abilities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Second Language Accent Faking Ability Depends on Musical Abilities, Not on Working Memory

2019

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Studies involving direct language imitation tasks have shown that pronunciation ability is related to musical competence and working memory capacities. However, this type of task may measure individual differences in many different linguistic dimensions, other than just phonetic ones. The present study uses an indirect imitation task by asking participants to a fake a foreign accent in order to specifically target individual differences in phonetic abilities. Its aim is to investigate whether musical expertise and working memory capacities relate to phonological awareness (i.e., participants’ implicit knowledge about the phonological system of the target language and its structural properties at the segmental, suprasegmental, and phonotactic levels) as measured on this task. To this end, French native listeners ( N = 36) graded how well German native imitators ( N = 25) faked a French accent while speaking in German. The imitators also performed a musicality test, a self-assessment of their singing abilities and working memory tasks. The results indicate that the ability to fake a French accent correlates with singing ability and musical perceptual abilities, but not with working memory capacities. This suggests that heightened musical abilities may lead to an increased phonological awareness probably by providing participants with highly efficient memorization strategies and highly accurate long-term phonetic representations of foreign sounds. Comparison with data of previous studies shows that working memory could be implicated in the pronunciation learning process which direct imitation tasks target, whereas musical expertise influences both storing of knowledge and later retrieval here assessed via an indirect imitation task.

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An Aptitude for Speech: The Importance of Mimicry Ability in Foreign Language Pronunciation

Cited by 7 publications

References 9 publications

The Bold and the Beautiful: How Aspects of Personality Affect Foreign Language Pronunciation

The Bold and the Beautiful: How Aspects of Personality Affect Foreign Language Pronunciation

A prospectus for pronunciation research in the 21st century

Second Language Accent Faking Ability Depends on Musical Abilities, Not on Working Memory

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