14 DAY TRIAL // A new scientific investigation conducted in Sweden has revealed that the main difference between native speakers and those who use Swedish as their second language is the amount of “special” word combinations they use.
The concept refers to expressions made of plain words, but which mean entire different things than the sense of the individual words put together.
For example, an native English-speaking person may use “put in my two cents” as a way of expressing the fact that they are just expressing their opinion on something.
For those who use English as a second language, that may sound counterintuitive, or they may simply not know the expression.
Basically, what the new study says is that, if you go on for long enough without using these special word combinations, people will realize that you are not a native speaker.
The situation is especially true for Sweden, say investigators from the Gothenburg University, who conducted the new work.
Native Swedish speakers tend to use numerous expressions of this sort, a lot more than speakers of other languages. Non-native speakers tend to stand out from the crowd in this country.
The research was conducted by language scientists at the UG Department of Swedish, who were led by PhD student Julia Prentice.
She focused her work on understanding how teenagers who live in multilingual urban environments in the country move away from established rules of using fixed word combinations.
These combinations are called conventionalized expressions. The team also looked at how the teens mastered an array of about 50 such expressions, both when speaking them and in writing.
“I found a tremendous variation in terms of the mental images that the adolescents base their use of conventionalized and metaphorical phrases on,” Prentice reveals.
“For example, they may bite their nails like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck on a camping trip (referring to a popular cartoon that most Swedes can relate to) when the problems are piling up like the pyramids of Egypt,” she adds.
One interesting thing the research noticed was the presence of a phenomenon called “contamination,” which refers to when people combine two or more expressions into one.
“Contaminations are especially interesting since they indicate that adolescents make associations between established phrases based on individual words or parts of meanings of phrases that may be the same for two or more expressions,” the team leader says.
“These are interesting results, for example considering the role of fixed phrases in vocabulary learning,” Prentice concludes.