My English sounds better than yours: Second language learners perceive their own accent as better than that of their peers, Mittlerer et al., 2020
Paper, Tags: #linguistics
Second language (L2) learners perceive their own accent as closer to the target language than the accent of other learners, due to frequent exposure to their own productions.
Objective feedback may be crucial in fostering L2 acquisition and reduce fossilization of erroneous patterns, since learners would standardly assume that they are closer to the target than they are.
There is evidence that L2 learners comprehend an accent better if that accent is similar to their own. Such a bias would have consequences for their ability to further improve their L2 pronunciation, as they perceive themselves as more target-like than they are.
L2 learners sometimes comprehend L2-accented speech better if speaker and listener share their first language, even though this effect may be moderated by the proficiency of both the talker and the listener.
If learners perceive their accent as better than that of others, this might make them less likely to notice errors. If they fail to notice their errors, continuing this rationale, they are unlikely to correct them as there may be little motivation to further improve. Given that the bias is also relatively large (i.e., one quantile overestimation), this is a realistic scenario, above and beyond just being a statistically significant effect.
While it remains to be shown how external feedback affects one’s own accent ratings or how feedback in one’s own voice could be practically integrated in real classroom situations, relying on self-monitoring alone may not be enough to lead to improvement in the L2.