•
TESOl
QUARTERLY
Vol. 15. No. A
December
1981
The Phonological Basis of Foreign Accent,'
A Hypothesis*
James
Emil Flege
Foreign accent is often thought to be the result of an age-related
diminution in the ability to learn to pronounce languages. Existing
studies of L2 pronunciation, however, do not seem to support the claim
that there is some fundamental difference between children and adults
in phonetic learning ability. The continued presence of foreign accent
may instead be a consequence of the establishment of stable phonological representations for sounds and words in the native language. Language learners who perceive sounds in the target language to be
phonologically identical to native-language sounds (despite possible
phonetic differences between the two languages) may base whatever
phonetic learning that does occur during the acquisition process on an
acoustic model provided by pairs of similar sounds in two languages,
rather than on a single language-specific acoustic model as in first-language acquisition. Thus an adult or child learner of a foreign language
may retain the same kind of phonetic learning ability evident in early
childhood and yet still speak with an accent because phonological
translation provides a two-language source of phonetic input that may
ultimately limit progress in learning to pronounce a foreign language.
It has been observed that adults learning a foreign language "never
seem capable of ridding themselves entirely of foreign accent" (Scovel
1969:245) whereas most normally developing children "learn to recognize
and pronounce the sounds of ... their speech community so well that ...
their speech lacks any trace of the foreign accent of people who learn the
language later" (Ferguson and Garnica 1975: 154). The observation that
children and adults differ fundamentally
in their ability to learn to pronounce a foreign language has led to the formulation of a critical period
hypothesis. The continued preselice of foreign accent in the speech of postpubescent language learners has often been specifically linked to neurophysiological maturation and the establishment
of cerebral lateralization
for language functions (Penfield and Roberts 1966, Lenneberg 1967, Scovel
1969). According to a critical period hypothesis for second language learning, adults usually cannot learn to speak a foreign language without accent
because the central nervous system undergoes some permanent reorganiza• The author would like to thank Roy Koenigsknecht for conmlents on a previous
version of this paper. This work was supported by NINCDS grant NS07IOO to the
Department of Communicative Disorders at Northwestern University.
Mr. Flege is NIH Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Communicative Disorders at Northwestern University. He has published in Language and Sp'!ech and
Lang/lage
Leaming
on second language acquisition.
443
444
TESOL Quarterly
tion at ahout puberty, therehy distinguishing
adults and adolescents frorn
younger language learners.
In a recent phonetic study of English pronunciation
hy non-native'
speakers, Flege (1980) noted a direct inAuence of phonetic characteristics
of Arahic on the English stops produced by Saudi Arabians. Even the more
experienced of two adult speaker groups (.3 years resiuence in America)
continued to produce stop consonants much as if they were Arabic sounds.
There was, however, some evidence of phonetic learning. The more experienced Saudis produced a durational contrast between word-nnal Ip-b/,
It-d/, and Ik-gj. However, the magnitude of the durational contrast produced by the Saudis was much smaller than the one produced by Americans, seemingly because of the absence of a similar duration contrast between word-final stops in the Saudis' native language. ~;[oreover, it was
noted that experienced Saudi speakers of English more nearly approximated
native English pronunciation
than did newly arrived Saudis. For both
groups, however, it seemed that phonetic implementation
of the stop voicing contrast was characteristic
neither of Arabic nor of English. Instead,
values for the phonetic parameters
fell between those measured for stops
in Arabic and stops in English.
Findings such as this raise two questions about how adults learn a
second language. First, why did the Saudis not simply use Arabic sounds
when producing English words if, in fact, they had passed a critical period
for learning to pronounce foreign languages? Second, since the Saudis did
modify their pronunciation
of English stops, why wasn't their modification
complete? In other words, why did the Saudis' production of English stops
seem to represent a compromise between the phonetic characteristics
of
Arabic and those of English?
It is unlikely that small phonetic differences such as those noted between
the Saudis and Americans would in themselves be sufficient to cause the
perception of segmental substitutions
by American listeners. Yet such phonetic differences are of interest because they may contribute to what is
perceived as a foreign accent. ~loreo\'er, an understanding
of factors that
tend to limit the extent of progress in foreign language pronunciation
at
any level of analysis may offer insight into why language learners often
seem to show a distinct limit on the extent to which L2 pronunciation
ordinarily improves (Selinker 1972. Nemser 1971).
In this article "Oe shall consider foreign lanCTuacre
o ~ pronunciation
from
several perspectives. First, we will discuss some of the dimensions that may
form the acoustic basis of foreiCTn accent. Second we will review evidence
.::>
,
concerning the claim that children and adults differ fundamentally
in terms
of phonetic learning ability. And. third. we will propose an alternative to
the critical period h~'pothesis to account for the continued presence of a
foreign accent. The phonological translation hypothesis proposed here starts
Foreign
Accent
445
\rith the assumption that neither physiolol.!ical maturation nor neurological
fcprg:;U1ization renders an adult incapable of speaking a foreign language
\\'ithout an accent.
1. Foreign
Accent
Perception of a foreign accent derives from differences in pronunciation
of a language hy nati\"e and non-native speakers. The most readily apparent
b;lSis for a foreign accent are mispronunciations
that lead to the perception
of ;1 segmental sound substitution, such as in French-accented
I sink so or
.\r;lbic-accented I put my car in the barking lot. One recent study indicated
th,lt the frequency with which segmental substitutions were noted in short
excerpts of speech produced by non-native speakers was highly correlated
\rith native-speaker judgments of accentedness (Brennan, Ryan, and Dawson 1975).
However, this does not necessarily mean that perception of a foreign
.1ccent is hased just on overtly detectable mispronunciations
of sound segments. Listeners are more likely to base a judgment of foreign accent on
some combination of segmental, subsegmental,
and suprasegmental
differences which distinguish the speech of native from that of non-native speakers. Some mispronunciations
which depart from target-language
phonetic
norms may merely sound distorted, such as the underaspirated
jptkj that
can often be heard in the English produced by native speakers of Romance
languages. An important question is whether every audible acoustic differenC'e is weighted equally when a foreign accent is perceived. One study
(Flege and Hammond 1980) suggests that at least not all segmental sound
substitutions produce a similar effect. \lonolingual
English speakers were
asked to try to read English sentences with a Spanish accent. Their imitations of Spanish-accented
Eng1ish included a number of the sound substitutions one might associate with a stereotypic Spanish accent. Some sound
substitutions were produced much more frequently than others, suggesting
that they may figure prominently in what Americans perceive as a Spanish
.\ccent in English.
2. Cross-language
phonetic
differences
Children not only learn to produce sounds intelligibly in their native
language, they also learn to produce them according to the languagespecific phonetic norms of the surrounding speech community. The monolingual child's attainment
of accent-free speech in the course of normal
speech development
is by no means a trivial achievement,
for human
languages manifest considerable variation at the phonetic level. Languagespecific phonetic characteristics
mmt be acquired by the child if sjhe is
to sound like a native speaker. At the same time, the many phonetic differences which distinguish
h\"o languages represent a potential source of
foreign accent in the speech of a second language learner since interference
446
TESOL Quarterly
during second language acquisition appears to be prominent at the level
of phonetic implementation
(Flege and Port 1981).
Some phonetic differences between languages may he localized at tlw
level of phonetic segments. The fact that phonetically similar sounds ill
two languages might be transcribed
,,'ith the same IPA symbol should
not ohscure the fact that sounds may- be realized differently at the phonetic:
level. For example, the Danish vo\ ••.el Iii is higher than its phonologica:
counterpart in English. Both Hallsa and h":alabari, to take :mother example,
have a voiced bilabial imposive in the phonetic surface hut the same
sound is produced with a very different kind of voicing in the two languages (Ladefoged
1980) . Vowels preceding a nasal consonant may be
nasalized to a greater extent in some languages than others (Clumeck
1976) .
Phonetic differences between languages that may potentially contribute
to accentedness
may be suprasegmental.
For example, average speaking
fundamental
frequency may differ cross-linguistica!1y (Majewski, Hollein.
and Zalewski 1972) as may the fundamental frequency variations which
underlie similar intonation contours in two language (vViI1ems 1978).
Cross-language
differences may also be thought of as subsegmentaL
such as the speech timing differences between languages which together
affect the perceived rhythmic qualities of speech and may carry over from
the native to the target language. For example, the extent to which vowels
are lengthened at the end of an utterance may be much greater in some
languages than others (Delattre 1966, Oller 1977). In languages where the
voicing characteristic of a consonant influences the duration of a preceding
vowel, the relative magnitude of this effect appears to differ substantial1y
across languages (Chen 1970). Even the phonetic domain within which
successive phonetic segments have a temporal influence on one another
seems to vary across languages.
In English, for example, a consonant
affects only the duration of a preceding vowel, while in Japanese theduration of a consonant seems to affect the duration of both preceding as
well as following vowels (Port, AI-Ani, and Maeda 1980).
3. Child
vs. adult
phonetic
learning
Considering the many phonetic differences that might distinguish the
learner's native language from a foreign language, one might wonder if
any learner of a second language-child
or adult-will
manage to pronounce a foreign language completely without accent. At this point, Wt
simply don't know if a speah:r can be bilingual at the phonetic level, or it
native-like pronunciation
at the level of phonetic implementation
is evel.
necessary for accent-free speech. If children are more capable than adult. •.
of learning to correctly pronounce foreign languages, they will of courSt'
be more likely than adults to escape the onus often associated with ac-
r
Foreign
ccntedness.1
Existing
empirical
447
Accent
('vidence,
however,
does not seem to sup-
port the notion that there is a true qualitative difference in how well
children as opposed to adults pronounce foreign languages, A foreign accent can sometimes be detected in the speech of children (Vallette 196-1.
.-\.sher and Garcia 1969). At the same time, some adults appear capable
of producing a foreign language without accent (\Villiam 1980, Ncufeld
19S0 ) .
Several studies have investigated how English native speakers rate the
English produced by individuals who began learning English as a foreign
language at various ages. Some such studies seem to indicate that the
speech of someone who begins learning a foreign language at an early
age will be perceived as less accented than that of someone who begins
learning at a relatively later age (Asher and Garcia 1969, Fathman 1975,
Oyama 1976). But at least one study indicates that older children and adults
may be, at least initially, more successful than young children in pronouncing a foreign language (Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle
1978). Still other
studies indicate that older children and adults can imitate words in an
unfamiliar foreign language better than young children, and that ability
to discriminate
unfamiliar sounds in a foreign language-seemingly
a
prerequisite
for the development of correct pronunciation-may
actually
improve rather than diminish with age (Politzer and Weiss 1969, Snow
1977, \,yinitz 1981). Finally, it appears that pronunciaand Hoefnagel-Hahle
tion of a foreign language by both adolescents and adults will improve
with additional exposure (Asher and Garcia 1969, Snow and HoefnagelHahle 1977, 1978), at least within limits (Oyama 1976).
Thus at present there does not appear to be evidence of a fundamental
difference between children and adults in their ability to learn to pronounce
a second language. There will admittedly be instances where a child's
accent appears to diminish more rapidly or thoroughly than an adult's.
However, such disparities might be due to differences in linguistic input
(Burling 1981), cultural expectations
(Hill 1970), or to the period of
l In several experiments,
listeners
have
been
asked
to evaluate
the personality
of
aevaluational
speaker after
listening toa short
of speech.
the listeners
such
experiments,
single samples
talker has
produced Unknown
a single to speech
sample intwice,
once in an accented guise and another time with no accent (Anisfeld, Bogo, and Lambert 1962, Arthur, Farrar. and Bradford 1974). In other experiments,
speech samples
produced by larger numbers of both native and non-native speakers have been evaluated
(Ryan
and Carranza
1975). The consistent
finding of such studies seems to be
that a person whose speech is accented will be rated less favorably
(along subjective
rating scales such as intelligent vs. stupid or kind 'Is. cruel) than speakers who talk
without a foreign accent. Other studies have established
the validity of using such
rating scales to measure subjecth'e reactions to a complex phenomenon
like accentedness.
accentedness
resulting
from psychophysical
techniques
(magnitude Measures
estimation, of sensory
modality
matching)
show a high scaling
correlation
with measures
derived from rating scales. Such studies indicate that not only are native speakers without special phonetic training quite capable of distinguishing
native from non-native
speakers, but also that they can reliably distinguish
between degrees of accentedness
(Brennan,
Ryan, and Dawson 1975, Ryan, Carranza, and l\Ioffie 1977) d. Giles 19(2),
Unfortunately,
for most foreign language learners, the greater the degree of perceived
accent, the more unfavorably a speaker will be evaluated.
448
TESOL Quarterly
time over which pronuTlciation continues to show ill1pro\TnH.'nt for learners
of different ages (SIlOW and I-Ioefuagel-H()hle 1977) rather than IH.'uwphysi_
olngical matllfatioll or reorganization.
4. Simultaneous
VS.
successive
learnin~
Perhaps the best way to learn two languages without accent is to learn
both in early childhood. There is some tentative evidence from siIH~le subject observation to suggest that young children who acquire two languages
simultaneously hefore about age 3;0 may produce both languages with a
1978), at least insofar as judged by t:1e
nath'e-Iike accent (~rcLaughIin
standards of articulation that adults apply to child speech. For example,
a two-year-old exposed to English and German produced the word ball
(Ball) differently in those two languages.
In English she said [ba U] and
in German [baI], thereby approximately
the dark word-final [1] of English
and the light (1) of German (Leopold 1947). Another t\vo-year-old, who
was learning English and Portuguese, produced voiceless stops with aspiration when speaking English but without aspiration in Portuguese (Major
1977). Given the scarcity of empirical evidence, it would be premature to
assume this is typical of early childhood bilingualism. But if such a pattern
is characteristic,
it might provide some insight into why it seems young
bilingual children are more apt than others to pronounce hoth languages
with native-like accents. Perhaps such children learn the sounds occurring
in the phonetic surface of their two languages independently,
much as if
each sound were a separate phoneme in an enriched, pan-language system.
5. The phonological
translation
hypothesis
It may perhaps be more useful to ask why anyone should speak a foreign
language with an accent than to ponder the source of possible differences
in degree of accent between children and adults. One possible approach
to this issue would be to determine why children acquiring a second language before about age 3;0 may be more likely than older learners to
speak the second language without accent.
One possibility is that there is a critical period for phonetic learning
and that it occurs long before puberty (Krashen 1973). If so, age rather
than simultaneity of learning is the crucial factor. However, a more probable
cause, in my estimation, is the important difference in phonological development between the young child who simultaneously
learns two languages
and the older child or adult who begins learning a second language after
the establishment
of the first. One important difference Illay be that only
relatively mature speakers are apt to interpret sounds in a second language
in terms of sounds found in another language.
I would like to propose that a tendency by mature speakers to interpret
sounds occuning in a foreign language in terms of sounds found in their
native language may he a more important cause of foreign accent than
Foreign
Accent
449
limitation on phonetic learning imposed by neurophysiological
maturation (Lenneherg
1967). It has been observed that before about the age of
three hilingual children often do not fully realize they are speakin!! two
different languages (McLaughlin
197f)). a confusion which is most reaclily
,Ipparent from language mixing at the lexical level (Redlinger and Park
19RO). ~Ioreover,
young pre-literate children may not yet be capahle of
reliably identifying phone-sized
units in speech (~'lorais, Gary, Alegria,
:111(1 Bertelson
1979). Somewhat older children, however, clearly do distin-
allY
guish between languages and seem to be aware of the similarity of sounds
found in two languages
(see Tervoort 1979). For example, a young
American boy speaking French used English words spoken with a French
,Iccent when he didn't know the French equivalent (Valette 1964). Englishspeaking children have been observed trying to "speak" Spanish by producing English words with a Spanish accent (Hernandez-Chavez,
cited in
Ervin- Tripp 1974). American children exposed to French for only a month
showed in an informal experiment that they were able to produce English
words with French sounds (Ervin-Tripp
1974). This kind of linguistic behavior suggests that even children are capable of phonological translation
(Catford 1965) between the sounds of two languages, a factor that may
potentially influence their production of sounds in both languages.
The phonological translation hypothesis can be illustrated by considering how French native speakers produce English words. VOT (voice onset
time) is a well known acoustic measure of the laryngeal timing differen~es
which may serve to distinguish a voiceless stop (like Ip/) from its voiced
homorganic cognate Ubi). A VOT difference between voiced and voiceless stops can be observed in the speech of English-learning
children as
early as age two (Macken and Barton 1980). Figure 1 displays VOT
values reported by Caramazza for stops in isolated English words produced
by monolingual and bilingual speakers of English and French. Children
acquiring English as a first language will eventually learn to produce
stops in a similar phonetic context with VOT values like those seen here
for adult English monolinguals in Figure la (about 60-90 msec). Children
learning French, in contrast, will eventually produce stops with the relatively short VOT values (0-30 msec) typical of French, such as those seen
here for French Canadian adults in Figure 1d.
Since corresponding
French and English stops al'e realized differently
at the level of phonetic implementation,
how will a French Canadian
produce English stops? Previous research and common experience tell us
that the English produced by French Canadians is likely to be accented.
:\Ioreover, there is reason to think that subsegmental phonetic differences
such as the VOT difference between English and French stops may be
detected by listeners experiencing a foreign accent (Flege and Hammond
1981). Thus we might expect the VOT values in English \vords produced
450
TESOL
Quarterly
FIGURE 1
/
~fl'an \'OT in msec of'ptk . in English and French words produced
by
(A)
IIHmolinL!ual EnL!lish speakers;
(B)
French
Canadian
speakers
of
En.dish: (C) hilinL!lIal French ClI1adians:
(D) monolingual
French
Canadialls: and (E) Illonlllill!.!lIal French speakers ill Franct'.
201PLACE
w
OF
-~I
40
60 I
zx'--- ::!:z> 100
.- I
ARTICULATION b
....,
f)
~---
Ikl
It I
Ipl
0
ENGLISH
80
~
r
WORDS
This ngure is based
~
IB
FRENCH
[~
on data reported
by Caramazza,
to either match
or resemble
Yeni-Komshian,
and Carbone 1973, and Caramazza and Yeni-Komshian 197-1.
by French
Canadians
WORDS
Zurif,
the VOT values mea-
sured in phonologically
similar French words. In fact, as seen in Figure
lb, it appears that French Canadian speakers produce English words with
VOT values between those typical of English and French.
Two aspects of these data are important
to the present discussion.
First, the French Canadians produced English words with shorter VOT
values than monolingual English speakers. And second, although the English stops' of French Canadians were not completely English-like, they
were nonetheless different from the stops produced in French \\lords by
these same speakers.
These data can be interpreted
in two radically different ways. One
can infer that the French Canadians, who began learning English at about
six, did not possess the same phonetic learning ability as somewhat younger
children acquiring English as a first language. But one can instead interpret
these data to mean that the French Canadians did not differ from young
Foreign
children
in terms
of phonetic
451
Accent
learning
ability.
The
French-Canadian
hilinguals studied by Caralllazza et a!. may have produced English stops
with smaller VOT values than the English monolingual precisely hecause
the capacity of older children and adults for l{>arning to pronounce ]ang:uages remains essentially unchanged from early childhood.
It seems reasonable to think that the French-speaking
child who is
exposed to English will consider English /p/, for example, to be the
same as the Ip/ found in French words despite VOT and other acoustic
differences between French and English stops. Phonologists since Trubetzkoy have recognized that a listener interprets sounds in a foreign language
in terms of phonological categories of the native language (see Lisker
1978). One important consequence of phonological translation may be that
a French-speaking
child (or adult) learning English as n second language
will base production of English Ipl on the acoustic phonetic model provided by voiceless bilabial stops occurring in both English and French
words.
Recall that the French Canadians pronounced
Ipl differently in English and French. If we assume that the acoustic model upon which they
based production of English was just the acoustic substance of sounds in
English words, we must necessarily conclude that their phonetic learning
was only partially successful. This would of course imply that these language learners differed in some important way from somewhat younger
children acquiring English as a first language. But if, on the other hand,
the French Canadians based their production of English words on a composite of corresponding sounds (and other nonsegmental phonetic dimensions) occurring in both their languages, one might reasonably conclude
that their phonetic learning was completely successful.
The VOT of English stops produced
by the French Canadians was
intermediate between monolingual French and English values. This seeming compromise between French and English patterns of phonetic implementation may reflect a restructuring
of the phonetic space so that it
encompasses two languages (\,yilliams 1980). Such a convergence can be
described in Piagetian terms as the accommodation
of existing French
patterns of stop production
to the English pattern, together with an
assimilation of the English pattern of stop production
to the French
Canadians' French phonetic pattern.
6. Testing
the hypothesis
It has been postulated here that children and adults possess the same
general capability for learning to pronounce foreign languages and t~at.
one important cause of foreign accent is phonological translation between
languages by speakers who already speak a first language. According to
the phonological translation hypothesis, an individual may be completely
successful in his/her phonetic learning of a second language and yet still
452
TESOL Quarterly
retain an accent hecall.';(, prol1l1nci:ltioll of tht' foreign Iallgtla~e is based
on pairs of corr('spondin~ sounds (or non-segmental phonetic dimensions)
found in the native and target language. The hqJothesis rf'sts on the assumption that hoth childrell and adult lan~ua~e l('al'l1('rs modify nativelanguage patterns of phonetic
implementation.
and that superordinate
acoustic models based on pairs of corresponding sounds or phonetic dimensions in two lan~l1ages serve as input for phonetic learning in second langllage acquisition. This hypothesis seems to be consistent with the results
of existing phonetic studies showing that the values of phonetic parameters
measured in the speech of second language learners are often intermediate
to those typical of monolingual speakers of the native and target language
(Pinkerton 1972, Suomi 1976, Niemi 1979. Flege 1980. Port and Mitleb
1980, Elsendoorn 1980, 'Williams 1980, Flege and Port ImH. :\[itleb 1981).
However, further investigation is clearly needed to evaluate the importance
of phonological translation as a mechanism leading to foreign accent.
The hypothesis as it is formulated
leads to two predictions through
which it is potentiaIIy falsifiable. First, it predicts that bilingualism
is
not possible at the phonetic level since it posits that pronunciation
of a
foreign language is, for most speakers, eventuaIIy shaped to conform to
an acoustic model provided jointly by the native and foreign languages. An
individual might learn to speak a foreign language without apparent
accent, but a fine-grained acoustic analysis should reveal differences between the language learner and native speakers of the target language
along those parameters where phonetic differences exist between the native
and target language. The expected pattern is for the language learner to
produce foreign language sounds in such a \Vay that they are phonetically
intermediate to those found in the native and target languages.
Second, one would expect phonetic learning in a second language to
affect pronunciation
of a learner's first language. If the acoustic model
provided by native language sounds can influence foreign language pronunciation, then foreign language sounds should, by virtue of their identification with native language sounds, exert an influence in the opposite
direction. The extent of such influence might be determined by such factors
as the discriminabiJity
of cross-language
phonetic differences,:! an individual's ability to transform an auditory image abstracted from an acoustic
model into a stable articulatory representation,
or the amount of use and/or
exposure to the foreign language (see Rosen 1979). Some support for this
prediction is evident in Figure 1, which shows that the VOT values in
French words produced
by French-English
bilinguals are slightly less
French-like (i.e., longer, in the direction of English values) than are stops
~ \Ve have n'ot discussed here the perceptual
modification which ma~' occur as the
result of exposure to a foreign language.
There is evidence to suggest that hoth discrimination
(~[acKain,
Best. and Strange 1980) and identification
(Williams
1980) of
foreign language speech sounds may change during second language learning. Such
changes might well influence speech production.
Foreign
Accent
453
produced
by French monulin.!.!;uals in either Canada
or France. Sonw\\'hat
more substantial
support for this prediction
is provided
by \Villiarns' ( 1980)
~tudy of Puerto Rican children learning English. \Villiams found that nativE'
Spanish-speaking
children
learned
to produce
English
stops with increasingly large (i.e .. English-like)
VOT values and also to produce
Spanish
stops more like English stops (i.e., \'lith more aspiration)
than monolingual
Spanish speakers.
The hypothesis
proposed
here wiIi not, of course, provide
an explanation for cross-language
interference
where translation
pairs of sounds or
non-segmental
dimensions
in two languages
cannot be identified
by theoretical or empirical
means. Nor does it attempt
to account for the carry-over
of phonological
processes
from the native to the target language.
However, it does provide
an explanation
for the important
interference
that
exists at the level of phonetic
implementation
during second language
acquisition
(Flege and Port 1981). If it is substantiated
by further research,
the phonological
translation
hypothesis
offered here may provide
insight
into why learners typically
continue
to show interference
at the phonetic
level when other aspects of their control of L2 are more nearly native-like.
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