Assessing phonetic talent in second language performance: The relationship between perception abilities in the native and the second language and production.

Abstract

An extensive project that aims to assess innate phonetic talent is introduced. It investigates language performance of 103 native speakers of German in their native language, in English and (to a limited degree) in Hindi. The project’s original priority is to establish a talent score that serves as the basis for a neurolinguistic study which attempts to find correlates between phonetic talent and brain anatomy/function. For this purpose tasks investigating neurobiological, psychological, and other factors influencing performance are also conducted. Innate talent is to be distinguished from superficial proficiency by limiting or eliminating the influence of interfering factors such as language experience. The test subjects are investigated with respect to different manifestations of their production (e.g., quasi‐spontaneous speech, reading), perception (e.g., discrimination, identification), and imitation abilities in both German and English. A first analysis of the interactions between all perception and production scores shows a significant correlation at the level of p < 0.05. The correlation is especially high (p < 0.01) between perception tasks involving the interpretation of intonational features of both English and German and production abilities (again both in German and English), suggesting a certain cross‐language predictive power.