Foreign Subtitles can Help Comprehension of a Second Language in a Regional Accent My recent efforts at speaking French whilst in the French-speaking part of Switzerland mostly provoked derisory laughter from the natives, so I know all about difficulties with accent and pronunciation. According to a new study, I could benefit from watching French films with French, but not English, subtitles. Like the boundaries between colours, the boundaries between verbal sounds (or phonemes) are somewhat arbitrary, and they can especially vary according to regional accent. Now the psycholinguists Holger Mitterer and James McQueen have shown that foreign-language subtitles can help us retune our perception of these phonetic boundaries thus aiding our comprehension of a foreign language spoken with an unfamiliar accent. Click the link for more information on the research. bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/foreign-subtitles-can-help.html
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 12:39:38 +0000
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