LxDP · What makes the Danish sound system so difficult for non-native learners?
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-08-01 → 2022-09-02
- EU contribution
- €207,312
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
What makes the Danish sound system so difficult for non-native learners?
Is learning Danish hard? Some describe it as the language of a thousand vowels and swallowed consonants. What about immigrants in Denmark? While research has shown that language proficiency plays an important role in both socio-cultural integration and employability of immigrants, knowledge on the linguistic problems facing non-native learners of Danish is extremely limited. From 2014 to 2018, Denmark received 131.032 immigrants from non-Western countries, which corresponds to more than 2% of the total population in 2019. Roughly one third of these people come from Arabic-speaking countries, and of these almost 75% come from Syria. Nevertheless, there is little research on Danish as a non-native language. The EU-funded LxDP project studies non-native speech learning of Danish focusing on the unnatural aspects of the phonology claimed to be the root of the difficulties in the acquisition of Danish. In order to gain a thorough understanding of how unnatural aspects of Danish phonology affect non-native speech learning, the LxDP project studied the effect of different types of theoretically predicted difficulties in the comprehension and production of Danish in Syrian Arabic speaking learners. This is the first time non-native speech learning of Danish is studied from a laboratory perspective. The findings will help improve language teaching materials for non-native learners, which can subsequently improve integration.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Danish is generally believed to be an especially difficult language to acquire for non-native learners. Since research shows that language proficiency plays an important role in both socio-cultural integration and employability of immigrants, the recent influx of immigrants from non-Western countries to Denmark call for more knowledge on the linguistic problems facing non-native learners of Danish. Nevertheless, Danish as a non-native language is hugely understudied.The problems are generally believed to lie primarily in the intricacy of the sound system, especially in the complex phonological processes. Phonologists have argued that Danish phonology is relatively unnatural due to the amount of discrepancy between the underlying abstract representation and the realised surface form of a sound as well as the many-to-many mappings between these two layers of representation. This analysis has led to theoretical predictions regarding the origins of difficulty, which currently have not been tested. The proposed project aims to test these theoretical predictions by investigating the effect of the different types of theoretically predicted difficulty on non-native speech learning. The effect of the different types of difficulty will be tested both in the comprehension direction and the production direction in order to get a thorough understanding of how unnatural aspects of Danish phonology affect non-native speech learning. The project will be the first to approach non-native speech learning of Danish from a laboratory perspective, thereby extending the scientific domain of the field.The outcome of the project provides a stepping stone to improve language teaching materials for non-native learners and better prepare language teachers, which is clearly called for as research shows that language school students find pronunciation the most difficult aspect of the Danish language and report that pronunciation receives the least attention in their Danish classes.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- AARHUS UNIVERSITET · Aarhus CCoordinatorDenmark
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union