Anatomical cause of an accent...

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Dtvonly
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Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby Dtvonly » Fri Nov 19, 2021 3:52 am

Is the tongue or vocal cord or both responsible for human having an accent?
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白田龍
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Re: Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby 白田龍 » Fri Nov 19, 2021 9:46 am

Accents are caused by the way the brain learns to process sounds and muscle memory.
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Re: Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby garyb » Tue Nov 23, 2021 6:19 pm

Slight tangent but something I've never really heard a good explanation for is the difference between "accent" and "voice" (non-technical terms, I know) and how that even if you get the individual phoneme sounds and the prosody (intonation, stress, rhythm) right you can still sound quite foreign because your voice just has, say, a non-French quality to it when you're speaking French.

I did read a book about accents a while ago and it said that one of the important points is placement: whether your voice is "placed" towards the front of the mouth, the nose, the throat, etc., and that varies a lot in different English accents. More recently I've been learning about vocal techniques and there are various factors that change the quality of the voice and make it sound more "dark" or "light", and I've never seen discussed in the context of language learning (maybe because they don't matter, but my experience is mostly that understanding and instruction of the voice is light-years behind in language teaching compared to in fields like singing and acting): larynx position, soft palate position, shape of the mouth (wider or narrower and more open), tongue compression, and twang (a level of closing of the throat just above the vocal chords, making a sound typical of some styles of singing, Texas accents, etc.). These could all be pieces of the puzzle. To be honest I gave up on the dream of sounding native-like years ago so I've not looked into it much.

As for anatomy, I have heard theories that native French speakers regardless of gender, ethnicity, etc. tend to have certain recognisable aspects of their face shape that result from producing French sounds from a young age, and similar for other languages, and that could influence of their accent/voice. It did sound a little pseudoscientific but again I've never looked into it any further.
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Re: Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby Herodotean » Tue Nov 23, 2021 6:43 pm

To run with the tangent, in all the language classes I've ever taken, I can remember only one time when I heard someone talk about the position of the jaw and its importance for improving your accent. I think he called it the "articulatory position," but it seems that "articulatory setting" is the usual phrase for tongue, lip, and jaw position, so I may be misremembering. It's not a coincidence that the instructor specialized in pedagogical English phonology. I think many (most?) language teachers don't know how to help students improve their accents and therefore don't think it can be done to any meaningful extent. They tend to settle for intelligibility, and even that is sometimes harder to achieve than it should be.
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Re: Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby Dragon27 » Tue Nov 23, 2021 7:09 pm

garyb wrote:It did sound a little pseudoscientific

It sounds like it's definitely pseudoscientific.
They only anatomical change I have ever heard of from speaking a language is Tony Traill developing a lump on his larynx from speaking !Xóõ (the same lump that the adult native speakers of the language had, but not the children).
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Re: Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby Steve » Tue Nov 23, 2021 9:15 pm

I tend to think of this as a default rest position or default relaxed position. Subjectively, it's where my lips, tongue, jaw, etc. seem to relax to when I'm not actively pronouncing a particular sound.

I found that as I did a lot of shadowing/chorusing of Spanish that some muscles in my mouth and face started to ache. After a time, the aching stopped and I found myself able to more consistently have a different relaxed position when pronouncing Spanish. I cannot pronounce some sounds (e.g. rolled R) when I'm in my normal English rest position and my vowels are definitely way off. However, when in this more Spanish-like rest position, it is easier to pronounce rolled R's and other sounds in a more Spanish-like manner. Subjectively speaking, it feels like my pronunciation of Spanish sounds comes from being in this new rest position. If I try to pronounce a Spanish name or word as part of an English sentence, I have to pause for a split second to reset my mouth to Spanish to say it.

I can't point to any academic or other work on this, but my limited experience and observation is that this relaxed position seems to be different in different dialects and languages. My sense is that this is an important part of having a more natural type of pronunciation in any dialect or language. Using myself as a single data point, I'd guess the reason many people struggle with pronunciation is that they try to use their native rest position to try to pronounce the new language. Instructions such as "Spanish E sounds like English long A such as in bait or mate leaves many English speakers learning new sounds by trying to use their native sounds rather than feeling Spanish E as something more akin to English bet or met with their mouth in a different position.
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Re: Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby breeda1 » Wed Nov 24, 2021 3:29 am

garyb wrote:To be honest I gave up on the dream of sounding native-like years ago so I've not looked into it much.


I honestly think that sounding native-like isn't as out of reach as we believe it is to be. I honestly think that accents are mostly a combination of input + mentality. Input in the sense that you need to have heard a native speaker speak enough to imitate the accent. Mentality in the sense that you kinda have to "kill" your native accent and subsume the role of another accent. Having practical knowledge of phonology expedites the learning process.

For example, I met some Palestinians who taught me a few phrases in their dialect. They commented on how native-like I sounded and said that I could've passed as one of them if I were on the phone. The way I imitated their accents was to pretend that I was one of them in the same way an actor plays a role. Once I "convinced" myself that I was one of them, the words flowed more freely.

I feel like more people could improve their accents if they just try imitating and pretending that they're a person of that culture. Most English-speakers don't even attempt to manage their accent ime and many others are afraid to try for fear of "sounding bad."
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Re: Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby garyb » Wed Nov 24, 2021 10:55 am

breeda1 wrote:
garyb wrote:To be honest I gave up on the dream of sounding native-like years ago so I've not looked into it much.


I honestly think that sounding native-like isn't as out of reach as we believe it is to be. I honestly think that accents are mostly a combination of input + mentality. Input in the sense that you need to have heard a native speaker speak enough to imitate the accent. Mentality in the sense that you kinda have to "kill" your native accent and subsume the role of another accent. Having practical knowledge of phonology expedites the learning process.

For example, I met some Palestinians who taught me a few phrases in their dialect. They commented on how native-like I sounded and said that I could've passed as one of them if I were on the phone. The way I imitated their accents was to pretend that I was one of them in the same way an actor plays a role. Once I "convinced" myself that I was one of them, the words flowed more freely.

I feel like more people could improve their accents if they just try imitating and pretending that they're a person of that culture. Most English-speakers don't even attempt to manage their accent ime and many others are afraid to try for fear of "sounding bad."

I agree completely, but that sort of acting and imitation comes much easier to some people than others and for me it's a question of cost versus benefit. I could spend a few hundred hours on making my Italian sound close to native-like, but the relatively small benefit I'd get from that isn't worth it especially considering all the other ways I could spend that time. This seems to be the conclusion of most discussions that come up here on native-like pronunciation: possible but usually not worth the effort. If I lived in Italy (or I were the proverbial spy that always comes up in these discussions) then sure, the benefits would be greater and it might well be a good investment of time.

I will say that as I've become more interested in the voice in general, for example for singing and public speaking, I've seen improvements in my ability to reproduce sounds and imitate voices, as well as just speak more clearly and fluidly. I can see how they could be applied to my languages, but again it's such a low priority that I've not tried to do this so can't show any results.
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Re: Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby Cainntear » Wed Nov 24, 2021 5:23 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
garyb wrote:It did sound a little pseudoscientific

It sounds like it's definitely pseudoscientific.
They only anatomical change I have ever heard of from speaking a language...

Perhaps the difference here is that he's not really talking about "anatomical" differences as much as postural differences.

The way you use your muscles becomes apparent in them. A gymnast doesn't look like a swimmer and a cyclist doesn't look like a runner, because they use their muscles differently. It seems to me that that happens with the face depending on the cultural meaning of gestures and the language where you grew up.

If your language doesn't use the lips much, you're likely to have less developed musculature around the front of the mouth, for example.

When I was younger I certainly believed I was able to identify French people on sight with better than average accuracy. I may have been wrong. Or it may have been about differences in clothing, hair and make-up fashions... I don't know.
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Re: Anatomical cause of an accent...

Postby Cainntear » Thu Nov 25, 2021 11:39 am

Dtvonly wrote:Is the tongue or vocal cord or both responsible for human having an accent?

Neither, really.

The children of immigrants pick up the accent of the place they move to if they're young enough, which proves it's environment and nothing to do with inherently physical characteristics.
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