New Colour Vowel Clock for haptic pronunciation teaching!

We have just revised the AH-EPS v2.0 vowel clock. I say "we" because Karen redesigned the clock to include all of the key words and symbols. I added a new colour overlay to her design that is, I think, a little more compatible with the general phonaesthetic qualities of the visual field. (See earlier post related to the colour issue with the popular Color Vowel Chart.) Kudos to Karen. Will have various v3.0 sizes available on website, too.

Keep in touch!

Synesthesia alert: No magnetic letters on your refrigerator!

Image credit: Synesthete.org

Especially if you have toddlers in the house! Well, not really. This study, by Witthoft and Winnawer of Stanford University, summarized by Science Daily, reports on what may well be a rather spurious or at least indirect correlation between the development of synesthesia and the presence on our refrigerators of those cute, plastic colored letters with magnets for young children to play with. What they found was that synesthetes, when given lists of colorless numbers and letters , tend to pick the same colors as those refrigerator magnet letters, whereas non-synesthetes' responses are pretty much random. How could that be? They don't say really, stopping short of suggesting that there is some direct relationship between the synesthesia and those letters being on the refrigerator during child development. Hmmm.  I just posted the following on an NLP discussion list:

"Interesting. Go to the website and take the test. When you do, before you respond to the query for your read on the "color" of the number or letter, say the number or letter out loud slowly, like a kid might. Note the overall felt sense of that articulation, where it lands in your head and vocal tract… and then pick your vowel. Better yet, look away from the grapheme when you do that. I can almost get to the synesthesia threshold that way . . . The research design neatly ignores controlling for how subjects get to making a decision, what cognitive and experiential process they lead with. (It is apparently done as a web-based survey only.) I am very suspicious of any direct link to childhood letters. That the letters happen to have been assigned those colors in the first place by the initial designers is probably more where it all leads."

So what does that have to do with haptic-integrated pronunciation work? Everything. The phonaesthetic   and somatic felt sense qualities of vowels, both in visual and articulatory terms, are well researched from several disciplines. Where the vowels are placed in the visual field in EHIEP and how the vowel sounds are presented and identified (or mis-identified) with letters in phonic characterizations, as in the "Refrigerator" study, does make a difference. (See earlier posts on the pedagogical application of vowel color such as this one.) Keep in touch.

Font of pronunciation work? A difference that makes a difference.

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

Research from several disciplines addresses the impact of font choice on everything from handwriting, to reading comprehension, to emotional reaction . . . to mediation of political perspective. Take a little tour through the pronunciation materials you have at hand. (If you are a "Phon-haptician," that has particular relevance, of course!) And then, read over the brief synopsis of font psychology as it relates to website design presented on TemplateMonsterBlog.

Most pronunciation change systems make explicit use of font design and manipulation, even if that only involves basic size, spacing, upper/lower case, super/sub-scripting, color, bold face, italics, underlining, etc. From a "haptic" perspective, the key is not just the impact of the visual display itself, but how that interacts with the rest of the multiple modality system. As many previous posts have explored, visual "clutter" can have a powerful, often neutralizing  effect on haptic anchoring of a word or sound.

Taking the TemplateMonster approach, the answer may be to figure out how to represent words graphically, probably in isolation for some procedures, with optimal emotional "sculpting." Hmmm. Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Pronunciation . . . Which one you like? (Those are my only easy choices here!) Or do you prefer to create the graphic images in any of several styles of handwriting? With new computer interfaces that is a piece of cake now as well. As we design the EHIEP visual interfaces and student workbooks that issue is, understandably, very important.

From the research, your first assumption should be that your favorite font-age for use in anchoring work is very likely not the same as that of many of your students.  GIving them  at least some responsibility for and guidance in creating their own visual schemata for pronunciation change may be key. Our experience is that, for whatever reason, it does make a DIFFERENCE! 

"Colorful words" about emotional interference (with pronunciation learning)

Clip art: Clker

Several recent posts have alluded to the importance of cognitive-affective balance in learning and memory. In this 2011 Science Daily summary of research by Hummer, Kronenberger, Mosier, Mathews, and Wang of Indiana University, reporting the effect of playing violent video games on control of emotion, it was demonstrated (not surprisingly) that the brains of subjects at least temporarily were "reset" to have significantly lower executive function over emotional responsiveness.

Interestingly, the instrument employed, an emotional interference test, used varying intensity and hue of color on key words in the visual field related to the game structures--along with fMRI technology--to study that effect. (I have got to get ahold of the word/color set of protocols, similar to that in another related study on depression!)

Of course, we can't simply alter activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or dorsal anterior cingulate mechanically or electronically . . . (See, however, earlier posts on Neurotherapy.), but there are any number of body-based and attentional focus techniques, like the color protocols in the study, that can to some extent keep the learner more "in the game," so to speak and enhance memory and access processes. What is important is that we are beginning to "see" (through fMRI examination) how that happens in daily life and in the classroom. It is more and more potentially within our control . . .

The color and felt sense of English vowels

The "Color Vowel Chart," apparently based on Finger (1985), is a clever mnemonic framework for giving students a memorable key-word and color for vowel sounds. Those CVC color choices are based on the vowel in the color word, etc.

The matrix below, by contrast, shows the EHIEP color schema, based on a number of studies of vowel phonaesthetic qualities, or felt sense, and related neurophysiological properties of the visual field. (See several earlier posts.) In essence, front and higher vowels are lighter; lower and back vowels are darker. The EHIEP vowels are displayed as a mirror image of the standard IPA vowel chart (which the Color Vowel Chart represents in standard format.)

Notice some of the interesting correspondences/contrasts between the two systems:
(a) The colors green and black are in the same positions,
(b) The "central" vowels are very similar in character, although not similarly aligned, and
(c) The diphthongs have some parallels. In CVC, "oy" is turquoise; in EHIEP it is blue to white. In CVC, "aw" is brown; in EHIEP, brown to green. In CVC, "ay" is white; in EHIEP, brown to white.
(d) In both CVC and EHIEP high vowels are lighter than low vowels.
(e) The CVC vowel color for "e" (red) is close to the EHIEP color (mid-front) of orange.
(f) The CVC vowel in "silver" would be white in EHIEP.
(g) The CVC for "blue" would be green or green to purple in EHIEP.

Light Green	Soft Yellow	Bright Yellow
Dark Green	Gray	Orange
Dark Blue	Purple	Red

For what it is, the CVC works well, but just imagine the impact were it to be a bit more neuro-physiologically tuned in and haptically anchored. Why . . . it'd be "off the charts!"

Pronunciation of "w" - a colorful green EYE-dea that sweeps curiously

With apologies to Chomsky, previous posts have explored the potential "hexus," or connections between the perceptual and neurophysiological nature of the visual field, the color spectrum and the phonaesthetic qualities of the English vowel system. (In addition to the metaphorical visual "space" used by various philosophical and other more down-to-earth conceptual systems.)

Clip art:
Clker

Clip art:
Clker

We have known for some time that the pedagogical movement pattern (PMP) for the English glide, 'w,' produces a momentary green hue in the center of the visual field. (Try this: Imagine a 6 inches in diameter, about 3 inches in front of your face, centered on your nose. Beginning at 11 o'clock, trace that circle with you right forefinger with both eyes fixed upon it, at moderate speed.) The PMP for 'w' begins with a semi-circle in that area as the sound is articulated. Actually the PMP begins in the green quadrant (NW) and ends in the blue (SW) or sweeps back up to NW.

Exactly why that happens is not entirely clear but obviously the circuits between the red and green sensors in the eyes are getting entangled. (Here is a summary of how the eyes process color, in general, that suggests something of what is probably involved.) As a student once remarked, it creates a temporary, rat-like worldview. That PMP, by the way, is a great quick fix for a learner who cannot do a word-initial 'w' as in "wood." The word, woo, even has that PMP on both ends! In HICP/EHIEP, even going around in (curious, colorful, green) circles can be productive . . .

From vowel color to vocabulary recall

Clip art: Clker

Common sense and marketers' and advertisers' collective wisdom suggest that color does have meaning, some of it culturally determined. As noted in the previous post, HICP assumes that the visual field also "contains" quadrants that have different emotional or experiential sensitivities. In very general terms, we associate basic colors with each quadrant: Northeast=yellow, Southeast=red, Northwest=green and Southwest=blue. Depending where in the quadrant, in the articulatory "chart" (a mirror-image of the standard IPA chart) a vowel is located, its intensity or hue may be increased or diminished accordingly. 2006 research by Spence, Wong, Rusan, and Rastegar of the University of Toronto makes a fascinating point as to when the color association must be made for maximum effectiveness.

In that study, various color conditions of natural scenes are used in different timings. Essentially what they discovered was that for best recall, color had to be very focused and associated with basic features or figures of the picture immediately, and not just the overall scene. One implication for our work is that color may work best in conjunction with haptic anchoring if it is introduced "from the beginning" of the process and (probably) limited to the vowel or syllable only and not the entire word, as is the usual practice with color/vowel pedagogical practices. Remember that, next time you need to make your vowels and vocabulary work more memorable, eh! 

Coloring (haptic-integrated) English vowels

There are traditions and analogous studies related to synaesthesia and vowel symbolism that link colors with vowel quality, both neurophysiologically and metaphorically. How about if were were to combine some of those frameworks, identifying vowel positioning in the visual field with their relative intensity, energy and hue, roughly speaking: high-front=yellow, mid-front=orange, high & mid-back=green, low central and back=blue, and schwa=dark gray. It might look something like this: We linked this 2007 study by Lowrey and Schrum last year in an earlier post on the phonaesthetics of English vowels. (with "gray-ground," of course!) 

In HICP we use something similar, except typically "coloring" only stressed vowels in words and/or phrases and altering hues as appropriate. (The coloring of the previous sentences uses only basic colors.) There are many different pedagogical systems that use colors mnemonically to connect to vowels, such as blue, red, green, etc., to help students remember vowels. One of those three, "red" colored red, actually does, in fact, match the HICP framework, using the intense red/orange for the mid-front (relatively vibrant) vowel felt sense in (at least) some dialects of English, including my own! (Note: This is a pedagogical system that has developed and been tested in the classroom, primarily.) 

The connections to research are intriguing but not the "prime mover" in what has evolved in the last year.) Forgive the vocal singing performance pun, but what your vowel teaching may need is just a little "color-a-tour-a!"