Background for my research

I usually refer to myself as an "applied phonetician." By that I mean that I am interested in all the ways in which the study of speech can help us address practical problems. My book Applying Phonetics: Speech Science in Everyday Life surveys the uses of phonetics, some of which may seem quite surprising to people unfamiliar with the field.

Most of the research I do with my colleagues, especially Tracey Derwing (Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta), focusses on the second language pronunciation of adult ESL learners. We seek evidence-based answers to fundamental questions, like "how does phonetic learning take place both inside and outside the classroom?", "what kinds of things should pronunciation teachers teach?" and "how should they teach them?".

A central aspect of our approach is a quite straightforward observation that we documented with quantitative data in 1995: that the strength of a learner's foreign accent is not very closely related to speech intelligibility or comprehensibility (see Munro & Derwing, 1995; 2020b). Despite its apparent simplicity, this finding has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of second language acquistion. My view is that some theorists have seriously misinterpreted research findings about foreign accents. On the one hand, it is true that accentedness is a common aspect of second-language acquisition; in fact, even young learners tend to retain a nonnative accent (see Flege, Munro, & MacKay; 1995). On the other, it is quite incorrect to view accents as evidence that adult second-language learners are "damaged goods," who have lost some fundamental capability and are doomed to "incomplete learning."

Misunderstandings of "accentedness" were exacerbated by the thinking of some mainstream and applied linguists of the 1970s and 1980s who were influenced by the popular special nativist ideas of the time.  It was proposed (and backed by poorly-managed data) that accents emerged at some particular age of learning, after which they became inevitable. Strangely, the specific age differed dramatically from study to study: age 15, age 12, or age 6! It also became popular to link accented speech to puberty. The best available evidence today does not reveal a discontinuity in the age-accent function.  And by the way, I do not know of a single research study that has examined the relationship between accentedness and puberty. That's not really surprising. Puberty is not an "age,"  and assessing a research participant's stage of puberty requires substantial medical expertise. Another problematic idea is that accentedness is the same as "phonology," and is therefore a measure of language proficiency. And still another is that pronunciation teaching is ineffective. There are strong counter-arguments, and plenty of empirical data, to call such notions into serious question.

If we really wish to understand the reasons why foreign accents exist, I believe we will need to develop a mechanistic account of the language acquisition process. Some researchers have made progress in understanding how the brain "wires itself" in infancy and earlier childhood. This work is helping us understand some of the finer details of language acquistion. But for most second-language learners, the important question is not the "why" of foreign accents, but the main "how" of language learning: how to develop effective communication skills in a new language.