February 23, 2013

Dutch with an accent just as easy to understand

Filed under: Science by Branko Collin @ 3:13 pm

People who speak Dutch with a foreign accent are just as easy to understand as native speakers. Listeners may need a while to adapt to the accent, anywhere from a few sentences to a few minutes.

Yesterday Marijt Witteman received her PhD for researching how fast listeners adapt to foreign accents. One perhaps surprising finding was that native speakers who were used to the accent, for instance, Dutch people living near the German border listening to Dutch spoken by Germans, understood words pronounced by language learners just as fast as they understood words pronounced by native speakers.

Even listeners who were not regularly exposed to the foreign accent only needed a few minutes of ‘priming’ to get up to speed. Witteman used reaction time tests in which subjects first heard a word, then saw the word written out on a screen, after which the subjects had to state if a word existed or not. Previous experiments had shown that people respond faster if they hear the word before they see it on the screen. The response times for words pronounced with an accent were just as fast as for words pronounced without an accent.

Witteman’s results could be useful in designing language courses. Course materials could be less about perfecting pronunciation and more about understanding a language. My personal take-away lesson is that Hollanders can stop pretending they don’t understand what the rest of the Dutch are saying. The game is up!

(Photo by Leo Viƫtor, some rights reserved)

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June 2, 2008

Foreign female professor in Nijmegen honoured in the US

Filed under: Science by Orangemaster @ 10:55 am
cutler.jpg

Anne Cutler, professor at the Institute for Cognition and Information at the University of Nijmegen and director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, has been elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US, a huge honour bestowed to very few people. To give you an idea, The National Academy of Sciences currently has some 2,000 active members, of which more than 180 are living Nobel Prize winners. Famous past members include Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright and Alexander Graham Bell.

Cultler’s research revolves around how the brain processes spoken language. In 1999 she was the first woman to be awarded the Spinoza Prize, a kind of Dutch Nobel Prize. Back then, Dutch feminists (Opzij magazine) jumped at the occasion to hail women’s achievements only to realise that Ann Culter is Australian. “The most intelligent woman in the Netherlands is Australian,” read the article.

And then most female top managers in the Netherlands are foreigners. Is the hint big enough now?

(Link: ru.nl)

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