A "Scanpath" down Memory (for pronunciation) Lane: The Eyes have it!

"Eye catching" new study on the function of eye scanning movements in memory creation and access, Eye-movement replay supports episodic remembering, by Johansson, Nystrom, Dewhurst and Johansson in the recent Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences. (Also summarized informally in Neurosciencenews.com). The general concept is that eye movement patterns ("scanpaths") that accompany creation of a memory are virtually the same as those used in recalling features of the memory later. 

From the abstract:

Our findings provide direct evidence that such scanpaths are replayed to assemble and reconstruct spatio-temporal relations as we remember and further suggest that distinct scanpath properties differentially contribute depending on the nature of the goal-relevant memory.

In other words, at some level the eyes, at least in episodic memory creation, as part of the overall visuo-spatial processing system of the brain, move in minute scan patterns of millisecond duration, which are not only accessible in recall of that event/episode, but are integral to it. How that relates to internal "events" inside the brain is not entirely clear, of course, but the research again confirms the correlation between path and event-in-time. As the research literature review in the research report relates, those eye movements and related phenomena have been the object of research and various therapeutic applications for over 70 years. 

And how does this relate to remembering or learning pronunciation? The key idea is what constitutes an "episode" in this context " . . . that the sequential replay of eye movements serves to facilitate pure episodic reconstruction in the absence of visual input." (from the article) According to that model, when a gesture is used, for example, associated with a new sound or perhaps an intonation contour, the two are "stored" together in a sense. Either may, in principle, then prompt recall of the other. If the pair are practiced together, the components of the two, the sound, itself, the kinesthetic "track" of the gesture, the "trail" in the visual field can be further joined and strengthened. 

That is, in effect, the basis of the KINETIK Method, as well having gotten its early inspiration from what is known as Observed Experiential Integration Therapy.  

From about 30 years of experience in working with gesture and sound change, the connection between what we call the "movement, tone and touch technique," the MT3, the complex of sound and gesture (and touch), when mapped onto a sound or word or phrase or clause or passage, is incredibly powerful. At times the eyes are actually tracking a gesture across the visual field; at others, the MT3 is out of direct line of sight, but, as the research reveals the "episode" is still embodied, in part, by one or more eye movements that are associated with it. How to exploit those complexes effectively is the question, of course. To learn more about how that works, go to www.actonhaptic.com/kinetik. 

Source: 
Eye-movement replay supports episodic remembering
Roger Johansson, Marcus Nyström,Richard Dewhurst and
Mikael Johansson
Published:15 June 2022 https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.0964

Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences

Now we are REALLY talking (with students about pragmatics with meta-pragmatics!)

More big news! Our latest research report, our second, "Role-play and dialogic meta-pragmatics in developing and assessing pragmatic competence," is now officially in press with Pedagogical Linguistics, coming out later this fall, hopefully! Here is the abstract: 

Role-play as a bridging and integrating practice in language teaching and development of pragmatic competence in learners is well-established. In an EAP classroom (Van Dyke & Acton, 2021) explored the impact of one fluency protocol, Cooperative Attending Skills Training, by which students were trained to listen attentively to shared personal stories, working toward more sophisticated strategies of conversational interaction. That system included dialogic, pragmatics-focused, spontaneous analysis and instructor-student discussion of interactional discourse features. With that experience, further modeling and conceptual input, participants in this study engaged in six role-plays, each involving a problem requiring pragmatic accommodation. The data from transcribed role-plays were analyzed in terms of pragmatic discourse functions and NVivo-based thematic threads. The generally successful application of the targeted skills and concepts by course end most likely resulted from the engaging meta-pragmatic interactions preceding the role-plays, and the formal and informal instructor feedback related to implicature, prosody, implicit understandings, direct conversation strategies, grammar, and vocabulary.

This is a follow on to the previous piece, probably the second of three or four: 

Van Dyke, A. & Acton, W. (2022). Spontaneous classroom engagement facilitating development of L2 pragmatic competence: A naturalistic study. Pedagogical Linguistics 3(1) 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1075/pl.20011.van

As reported in a previous blogpost, we'll be doing a pre-convention institute at the 2023 TESOL convention next March in Portland, based on our research. By then the next phase of the analysis, centering on prosodics and pragmatics should be in "presentable form." See you there!