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

Description du projet

Un examen plus approfondi sur le danois comme deuxième langue

Est-ce difficile d’apprendre le danois? Certains le décrivent comme la langue au millier de voyelles et aux consonnes aspirées. Qu’en pensent les immigrants au Danemark? Le projet LxDP, financé par l’UE, étudiera l’effet des différents types de difficultés prévues sur le plan théorique dans le cadre de l’apprentissage d’une langue non maternelle. Pour mieux comprendre comment les aspects peu naturels de la phonologie danoise affectent l’apprentissage d’une langue non maternelle, le projet testera différents types de difficultés concernant à la fois la compréhension et la production. C’est la première fois que l’apprentissage du danois comme langue non maternelle est étudié en laboratoire. Les résultats permettront d’améliorer les matériaux destinés à l’enseignement de cette langue pour les élèves non danophones.

Objectif

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.