Towards a better understanding of the needs of English learners of
foreign languages: are English listeners ‘stress deaf’?
A six month research project funded by the
University of York Research Priming Fund (January-July 2012).
Most people agree that it is hard to learn a new language
as an adult, but relatively little research tries to link why language learning
is difficult with how we can help learners do better. Of the research that
there is, most looks at sentence structure, rather than speech sounds, and
deals with the needs of people learning English, rather than the needs of
native English speakers learning other languages.
This project will address this imbalance by highlighting
the need for research on English learners of other languages: we will carry out
a study, then, share our results with other researchers, within and
beyond York, through a public conference and an inter-disciplinary workshop
to generate further research.
Our study replicates an experiment which showed
that French listeners can’t tell which syllable in a word is stressed (Dupoux et al 2001, 2007). We suspect that English listeners
have the same difficulty, but for a different reason: in French, stress is
always on the last syllable, so listeners don’t pay attention to stress at all
when they learn new words; we think English listeners do pay attention to
stress, but only ‘hear’ it if it sounds like English stress. If we’re right, there
is a way to help, using methods already developed to train learners how to
listen differently.
Our one-day conference on Second Language Acquisition
of Phonology - with a special focus on English learners of other languages -
was held on July 6th 2012. More information
is available on the conference
website.
Principal Investigator: Dr Sam Hellmuth email webpage
Former Postdoctoral Research Assistant: Dr
Becky Muradás-Taylor
Ø Becky is now Senior Lecturer at York St John
University: email webpage
For
further information please contact Sam
Hellmuth.
Updated 04.05.19