Speeking Multiple Languages and Accents

[Olentzero]

Well, just a couple things to throw into the works to see what comes of it.

I didn’t grow up in a multilingual, or even a bilingual, household. I did, however, start taking German lessons at a weekend school when I was 8 or 9, and did that for about three years. Would that have been enough to make it easier for me to learn other languages?

Originally posted by Eva Luna
**One drunken Russian woman who was wandering around Leningrad on the anniversary of the Great October Soviet Socialist Revolution refused to believe that I was American, insisting that I was merely a “domestic” hard-currency hooker who was afecting an accent to seem more sophisticated and therefore demand higher prices for my services. **

Nu privet, milochka, kak dela?

Originally posted by Fretful Porpentine
Er, actually, I do know three languages at an advanced level – English, Spanish, and Latin… Yes, I do have a heavy accent in all of them.

You should pardon me for asking, but… how do you know?

[Sparc]

‘kay so here we go.

This introduction to a conference on teaching and language acquisition gives a fairly good overview of the topic, with references.

Language acquisition is being studied in a field called statistical learning, which deals with our natural ability as infants towards pattern recognition in language and music.

Researchers like Elissa L. Newport and Jenny R. Saffran have shown that children have a natural capacity to distinguish any given foreign phoneme and that we acquire the ability to distinguish phonemes into syllables at about 8 months of age.

From ‘The acquisition of language by children’ by Jenny R. Saffran, Ann Senghas, and John C. Trueswell*
One important discovery using this technique has come from the work of Saffran and colleagues (2-5), who have examined the powerful role that statistical learning the detection of consistent patterns of sounds plays in infant word segmentation. Syllables that are part of the same word tend to follow one another predictably, whereas syllables that span word boundaries do not. In a series of experiments, they found that infants can detect and use the statistical properties of syllable co-occurrence to segment novel words (2). More specifically, infants do not detect merely how frequently syllable pairs occur, but rather the probabilities with which one syllable predicts another (3). Thus, infants may find word boundaries by detecting syllable pairs with low transitional probabilities. What makes this finding astonishing is that infants as young as 8 months begin to perform these computations with as little as 2 min of exposure. By soaking up the statistical regularities of seemingly meaningless acoustic events, infants are able to rapidly structure linguistic input into relevant and ultimately meaningful units.

In another article Saffran and Newtport note the importance of the level of exposure to language around this age:

Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants by Jenny R. Saffran, Richard N. Aslin, Elissa L. Newport
For example, acquiring the specific words and phonological structure of a language requires exposure to a significant corpus of language input.

A study by Newport and Johnson on native Chinese speakers with English as acquired language shows that post age 4, even when fully immersed we have difficulty to acquire universal properties of language considered to be innate (such as language particular and irregular grammar). This ability decreases dramatically with age of immersion to maturity where it becomes a chance occurrence. A further study showed that the critical period for language acquisition does however extend into the second language and strongly influences the fluidity that will be achived.

[This study](www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/kstansbu/ psych230/bilinguallanguagesign.pdf) [warning PDF] indicates that simultaneous bilingual acquisition follows the same pattern as monolingual acquisition as well as confirms my personal experiences in the creation of ‘neutral’ or borrowed words and the somewhat inexplicable fact that we native bilinguals have a preferred language independent of parental language preference.

Newport indicates in several places that her findings indicate that immersion in a multilingual environment before age six increases the retention of the early infant’s capacity towards language acquisition. I was not able to find a conclusive study on this during my brief browsing.

Further, I was not able to find anything directly related to accent. However, statistical learning has been shown to play a large part in all sound and vocal based cognition such as polyglotism and musicality. Hence, if Newport is right about an acquired ability to naturally continue acquisition into adulthood, it would be fairly logical to assume that we also carry with us the capacity to acquire accent along the same dynamics.

Last it should be noted that the issue of a critical age for language acquisition or the Critical Period Hypothesis stipulated by Lenneberg in 1967 is still contested, although Saffran, Newport et al. make a pretty good albeit novel case for it. This paper gives an overview of the arguments at hand.

I can’t say that this settles it, but all of it confirms my personal experiences and observations.

Sparc

[Fretful_Porpentine]

---

Originally posted by Fretful Porpentine
Er, actually, I do know three languages at an advanced level – English, Spanish, and Latin… Yes, I do have a heavy accent in all of them.

You should pardon me for asking, but… how do you know?

1. I can’t scan a line of poetry without memorizing which vowels are long and short, even if somebody else has read it aloud with the proper quantities, so I’m obviously missing something important.

2. If the Romans really sounded like mid-East-Coast Americans transplanted to North Carolina, it would be … well, not impossible, but a highly unusual coincidence.