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

Project Information

LxDP

Grant agreement ID: 894936

DOI

10.3030/894936

Project closed

EC signature date 15 April 2020

Start date 1 August 2020

End date 2 September 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 207 312,00

EU contribution

€ 207 312,00

Coordinated by

AARHUS UNIVERSITET
Denmark

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LxDP (What makes the Danish sound system so difficult for non-native learners?)

Reporting period: 2020-08-01 to 2022-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

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.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the LxDP project, we have designed and conducted a comprehension test and a production test in order to test how unnatural aspects of Danish phonology affect non-native speech learning. Our comprehension test is a picture identification test in which participants listen to Danish words and choose the picture that best depicts the word they think they heard among four pictures on a computer screen. Our production test is a verb conjugation test in which participants listen to Danish sentences containing a verb in present tense or past tense and rephrase the sentence to the opposite tense. In order to test different types of difficulty, the words in both tests varied with respect to a number of phonological parameters. Unfortunately, the data analysis has not yet been completed, so we still await the results.
The LxDP project also contains theoretical work on the unnatural aspects of Danish phonology. We have critiqued the traditional account of the unnatural aspects of Danish phonology and developed an alternative account that argues that the unnatural sound patterns investigated in this project do not pose the basis for Danish phonology, as is traditionally assumed, but are stored as lexical exceptions to the general phonological pattern.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The critique of the traditional account of the unnatural aspects of Danish phonology and the alternative account of these aspects developed within the LxDP project has been presented at several conferences and is published open access. We have received many positive comments on this theoretical work agreeing with our approach to Danish phonology. This theoretical work provides the starting point for a new research agenda for Danish phonology. Our laboratory tests (the comprehension test and the production test) constitutes the first step in adopting this research agenda. We therefore look forward to learning how the results of these tests relate to the theoretical analysis when the data analysis is finalised. The socio-economic impact and wider societal implications of the LxDP project also awaits the finalisation of the data analysis.

Picture from the picture identification experiment