Fascinating

From Mantle-Bromley (1992), Preparing Students for Meaningful Culture Learning:

Guioria [1972] and his colleagues have examined subjects' language egos, studying the relationship between subjects' sensitivity to cues in interpersonal situations (empathic capacity) and their ability to reproduce a foreign language. They found the degree of subjects' authentic pronunciation (which is psychologically the most difficult language behavior to manipulate) was significantly related to their empathy. Language ego, the personal egoistic nature of language learning, play such a part in each student's ability to take on new behaviors that it determines, in part, whether a student will succeed in the language class. (121)