What makes the Danish sound system so difficult for non-native learners?

Projektbeschreibung

Dänisch als Zweitsprache

Ist es schwer, Dänisch zu lernen? Manche beschreiben die Sprache als eine Mischung aus tausend Vokalen und verschluckten Konsonanten. Wie geht es Einwanderern nach Dänemark damit? Das EU-finanzierte Projekt LxDP wird die Wirkung verschiedener Arten theoretisch vorhergesagter Schwierigkeiten beim Zweitspracherwerb untersuchen. Ziel ist dabei nachzuvollziehen, wie unnatürliche Aspekte der dänischen Phonologie in den Zweitspracherwerb einwirken. Darum will das Projekt die verschiedenen Arten von Schwierigkeiten sowohl für das Verstehen als auch für das Sprechen testen. Erstmals wird hier der Zweitspracherwerb des Dänischen aus Laborperspektive betrachtet. Mit den Ergebnissen sollen Unterrichtsmaterialien für Menschen, deren Muttersprache diese Sprache nicht ist, verbessert werden.

Ziel

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.