Foreign subtitles can help comprehension of a second language in a regional accent

My recent efforts at speaking land whilst in the French-speaking conception of Switzerland mostly angry derisory laughter from the natives, so I know every about difficulties with pronounce and pronunciation. According to a new study, I could goodness from watching land films with French, but not English, subtitles.

Like the boundaries between colours, the boundaries between verbal sounds (or \"phonemes\") are somewhat arbitrary, and they crapper especially vary according to regional accent. Now the psycholinguists Holger Mitterer and saint McQueen have shown that foreign-language subtitles crapper help us retune our representation of these phonetic boundaries thusly aiding our involvement of a external module uttered with an unfamiliar accent.

One hundred and note land participants, proficient in both their autochthonous land and English, watched either a 25 time instance of the nation flick Trainspotting (featuring characters with strong arts accents) or a 25 time instance from the inhabitant arts sit-com Kath and Kim (featuring inhabitant accents). Half the participants had the goodness of land subtitles whilst the others had arts subtitles.

Afterwards the participants were played dozens of audio excerpts (without subtitles) from both earlier videos, plus novel excerpts not featured in the earlier videos, and their task was to move back the utterances as accurately as possible.

The key uncovering is that the participants who'd watched Trainspotting with arts subtitles were afterward such better at continuation back novel excerpts from that flick than were participants who'd either watched the flick with land subtitles or watched Kath and Kim. In other words, just 25 minutes exposure to arts uttered with a arts accent, plus arts subtitles, allowed participants to retune their representation of the language's sounds in distinction with the arts speakers. By contrast, land subtitles actually impaired performance, interfering with participants' ability to set into the arts accent.

It was a similar news for participants who watched Kath and Kim - arts subtitles helped them to set into the inhabitant accent, whereas land subtitles were a hindrance.

The researchers said their uncovering has important applicatory implications for people wishing to improve their acceptance of a second module uttered with a regional accent. \"It is often possible to superior external subtitles on commercial DVDs,\" they said. \"So if, for example, an American utterer of Mexican land wants to improve her understanding of dweller Spanish, we suggest that she should watch some DVDs of dweller land films with land subtitles.\"

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Mitterer, H., & McQueen, J. (2009). Foreign Subtitles Help but Native-Language Subtitles Harm Foreign Speech Perception PLoS ONE.