Empathy can improve accent
Taiwan Sun (IANS) Wednesday 12th August, 2009
An individual speaking a second language will have a lighter accent if empathy is extended to him or her, according to a new study.
The study was carried out at the University of Haifa (U-H) by Raphiq Ibrahim and Mark Leikin and Zohar Eviatar, psychology professors.
We all know how to identify the average Hebrew speaker trying to speak English: the Israeli accent is an easy give-away. But why is there an accent and what are the factors that make one speaker have a heavier accent than another?
One possibility is based on the cognitive discipline, which suggests that our language system limits the creation of language pronunciations in a non-native language.
'Israel is a perfect lab location for testing the topic of second languages, because of the complex composition of its population,' the study co-authors wrote.
The first stage of the study divided participants (U-H students) into three groups: 20 native Hebrew speakers, 20 Arabic speakers who learned Hebrew at the age of seven to eight and 20 Russian immigrants who learned Hebrew after age 13.
They were tasked with reading out a section from a report in Hebrew, and then to describe - in Hebrew - an image that was shown to them.
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