Love it or leave it: 2nd language body, voice, pronunciation and identity

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Recall (if you can) the first time you were required to listen to or maybe analyze a recording of your voice. Surprising? Pleasing? Disgusting? Depressing? There are various estimates as to how much of your awareness of your voice is based on what it "feels" like to you, not your ears, but somewhere around 80% or so. Turns out your awareness of what your body looks like is similar.

A new study by Neyret, Bellido Rivas, Navarro and Slater, of the Experimental Virtual Environments (EVENT) Lab, University of Barcelona,  “Which Body Would You Like to Have? The Impact of Embodied Perspective on Body Perception and Body Evaluation in Immersive Virtual Reality” as summarized by Neuroscience News, found that our simple gut feelings about how (un)attractive our body shape or image is is generally more negative  than if we are able to view it more dispassionately or objectively "from a distance," as it were. Surprise. Using virtual reality technology subjects were presented with different body types and sizes, among them one that is precisely, to the external observer what the subject's body shape is. Subjects rated their "virtual body" shape more favorably than their earlier pre-experiment self-ratings presented in something analogous to a questionnaire format.

In psychotherapy, the basic principle of "distancing" from emotional grounding is fundamental; all sorts of ways to accomplish that such as visualizing yourself watching yourself doing something disconcerting or threatening to you. It is the "step back" metaphor that the brain takes very seriously if done right.

In this case, when visualizing the shape of your body (or your voice, by extension as part of the body,) you'll see it at least a little more favorably than when you describe it based on how it "feels" internally, the reason "body shaming" can work so effectively in some cases, or in pronunciation work, "accent shaming."

So, how can we use the insights from the research? First, systematic work by learners in critically listening to their voice should pay off, at least in some sense of resignation or even "like" so that the ear is not automatically tuned to react or aver.  (I'm sure there is research on that someplace but, for the life of me, I can't find it! Please help out with a good reference, if you can on that!) Is this some long overdue partial vindication of the seemingly interminable hours spent in the language lab? Could be in some cases.

Second, once a learner is able to "view" their L2 voice/identity relative to some ideal more dispassionately, it should be easier to work with it and make accommodations. That is one of the central assumptions of the "Lessac method" of voice development, which I have been relying on for over 30 years. It also calls into question the idea that aiming toward an ideal, native speaker accent is necessarily a mistake. You have to "see" yourself relative to it as more of an outsider, not  just from your solar plexus out . . . through your flabby abs, et al. . . .  My approach to accent reduction always begins there, before we get to changing anything. Call it: voice and body "re-sensitization."

See what I mean? If not, have somebody you don't know read this post to you again at Starbucks . . .

Original Source:
“Which Body Would You Like to Have? The Impact of Embodied Perspective on Body Perception and Body Evaluation in Immersive Virtual Reality”. Solène Neyret, Anna I. Bellido Rivas, Xavi Navarro and Mel Slater. Frontiers in Robotics and AI doi:10.3389/frobt.2020.00031.