My 2013 Monroe research project is titled “The Effects of Native Language versus Culture on the Successful Acquisition of English Phonology.”

I will collect speech data from native speakers of Standard Østnorsk and Standard Spanish to investigate the effects of native language versus culture on the acquisition of English phonology. Norway has an English-integrated culture, broadcasting English-language television shows, teaching compulsory English to children from a young age and continuing into adulthood, and valuing English-Norwegian bilingualism in general. Spain exhibits less integration: English-language television programming is dubbed by Spanish voice actors, compulsory English education is shorter and less intensive, and English is seen as an optional language for the average Spaniard to learn. This makes the two countries good representatives of different extremes with respect to how the cultures view English as a second language. Norwegian phonology is similar to English phonology because they are both Germanic languages. Spanish, in contrast, is a romance language which belongs to a different language family. This sets up another dimension of difference between Spanish and Norwegian. Is the colloquial “foreign accent” pre-determined by a speaker’s native language, or is it a result of the depth/length of exposure to the foreign language? If one cause is more predominant, it can be targeted in foreign language learning to mitigate, if desired, the appearance of a “foreign accent,” giving my results a real-world application.

My research will take the form of personal interviews with English-speaking students between the ages of 18 and 26 at the Universitet i Oslo (who are native speakers of Standard Østnorsk) and at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (who are native speakers of Standard Spanish). These interviews will provide speech samples, which I will later transcribe to determine an individual phonetic inventory, as well as information about the English-learning history of each student. All of these results will be analyzed and discussed in the final product.

            The final product of my research will be a ten to fifteen page academic paper in the form of an analytic linguistic essay. This paper will examine why English is apparently acquired so differently in Spain and Norway, discuss how the“foreign accents” of each language differ, speculate as to whether culture or native phonology is the main cause of the difference I observed, and end by suggesting ways in which teaching English as a Second Language (and ultimately any foreign language) can be improved to avoid such obstacles. The results of this study will be useful to the global understanding of foreign language acquisition by revealing either native phonology or culture as the main cause of a “foreign accent” in English. However, the findings of this study should be (theoretically and generally) universal and not English-specific.