Why are foreign language learners typically unable to eradicate an accent, despite years of practice? When English speakers say the name of the pickle brand "Vlasic", why do they end up pronouncing it "Velasic"? It is evident that speakers attempting to pronounce non-native words either in foreign language acquisition or when borrowing words from other languages face serious difficulties. While researchers of language acquisition and loanword borrowing have long attempted to understand the factors that contribute to non-native pronunciation, one little-studied issue that has a substantial impact on the production of unfamiliar sound sequences (or phonotactics) is the coordination of adjacent sounds. Coordination refers to timing patterns in speech, such as the duration of a sound (like the /r/ in "rat"), or how much overlap exists among the articulations of adjacent sounds (does the tongue start moving to make the /a/ before it finishes producing the /r/?). Previous research has shown that coordination patterns are language-specific, which presents a challenge for speakers producing non-native sound sequences like the /vl/ of "Vlasic": not only must speakers learn which sounds can be combined into sequences, but they must also learn how such sequences are temporally coordinated. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Lisa Davidson will investigate how foreign language learners learn to produce non-native sound sequences and how language borrowers incorporate these sequences into their native language. Acoustic recordings will be combined with ultrasound imaging of tongue motion during speech to understand how the foreign language learner's speech differs from the intended goal in the target language. Another issue important both to language acquisition and to borrowing is how speakers initially perceive the sound sequences that they are trying to produce. The combination of information from perceptual data and from the way speakers manipulate coordination in the articulation of non-native sequences will provide critical insight into how speakers learn to produce foreign languages or adopt new words into their native language. For the education component of this project, graduate students at New York University will be offered classes that combine formal linguistic methods with both sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics to situate linguistics within a broader interdisciplinary context. In addition, both graduates and undergraduates will gain valuable laboratory experience. This research also benefits from interdepartmental collaborations with language teachers who have years of experience in foreign language classrooms. Through these partnerships, the results of this project can be disseminated to those involved in the teaching of foreign language pronunciation. Finally, NYU will host Ultrafest, a workshop that provides investigators using ultrasound in the study of speech production an opportunity to discuss both research and technical issues.
