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

Descripción del proyecto

Un análisis más detallado del danés como segundo idioma

¿Es difícil aprender danés? Algunas personas lo describen como el idioma de las mil vocales y las consonantes engullidas. ¿Y los inmigrantes en Dinamarca? El proyecto LxDP, financiado con fondos europeos, estudiará el efecto de distintos tipos de dificultades predichas teóricamente sobre el aprendizaje de la lengua oral por parte de hablantes no nativos. Para comprender mejor cómo afectan los aspectos antinaturales de la fonología danesa al aprendizaje de la lengua oral por parte de hablantes no nativos, en el proyecto se evaluarán los distintos tipos de dificultades en lo que respecta tanto a la comprensión como la producción oral. Es la primera vez que se estudia el aprendizaje del danés oral por parte de hablantes no nativos desde la perspectiva del laboratorio. Los hallazgos ayudarán a mejorar los materiales de enseñanza de idiomas para hablantes nativos de otras lenguas.

Objetivo

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.