Getting a feel for pronunciation: What our pupils can tell us!

Clker.com

What do you do with your eyes when you are struggling to understand something that you are listening to? (Quick: Write that down.) Now some of that, of course, depends on your personal wiring, but this new study “Asymmetrical characteristics of emotional responses to pictures and sounds: Evidence from pupillometry” by Nakakoga, Higashi, Muramatsu, Nakauchi, and Minami of Toyohashi University of Technology, as reported in neuroscience.com, sheds some new "light" on how the emotions may exert influence on our ongoing perception and learning. Using eye tracking and emotion measuring technology, a striking pattern emerges.

From the summary (boldface, mine):
"It suggests that visual perception elicits emotions in all attentional states, whereas auditory perception elicits emotions only when attention is paid to sounds, thus showing the differences in the relationships between attentional states and emotions in response to visual and auditory stimuli."

So, what does that imply for the pronunciation teacher? Several things, including the importance of what is going on in the visual field of learners when they are attempting to learn or change sounds. It has been long established that the process of learning pronunciation is especially susceptible to emotion. It can be an extraordinarily stressful experience for some learners. Even when there are no obvious stressors present, techniques such as relaxation or warm ups have been shown to facilitate learning of various aspects of pronunciation.

Consequently, any emotional trigger in the visual field of the learner can have either "pronounced" positive or negative impact, regardless of what the instructor is attempting to direct the learners' attention to. If, on the other hand, learners' attention is focused narrowly on auditory input and the emotional impact, you have a better chance of managing emotional impact FOR GOOD if you can successfully manage or restrict what is going on in the visual field of the learner that could be counterproductive emotionally (Think: Hypnosis 101. . . or a good warm up . . . or a mesmerizing lecture!)

That doesn’t mean we teach pronunciation with our eyes closed . . . when  it comes to the potential impact of the visual field on our work. Quite the contrary! How does the “front” of the room (or the scenes on screen) feel to your pupils? Can you enhance that? 

To learn more about one good (haptic) way to do that, join us at the next webinars!

Original Research: Open access
 “Asymmetrical characteristics of emotional responses to pictures and sounds: Evidence from pupillometry”.by Nakakoga, S., Higashi, H., Muramatsu, J., Nakauchi, S.,  and Minami, T.
PLOS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0230775

50+ ways to touch on and remember better pronunciation

Fascinating study by Hutmacher and Kuhbandner of the University of Regensburg  (summarized by ScienceDaily.com) that helps us better understand the possibilities and potential of haptic engagement in integrated learning and recall: Long-term memory for haptically explored objects: fidelity, durability, incidental encoding, and cross-modal transfer. 

In that study, blindfolded and not blindfolded subjects were asked to consider the texture, weight and size of 168 everyday objects--by handling them. The first group were told to memorize the objects since they would be tested later. (post-test accuracy of 94% ) The second group was instructed just to evaluate each item on its aesthetic qualities without further clarification as to what that meant.

In the follow up tests a week later subjects (blindfolded) were given half the items accompanied by similar items varying in only one parameter (texture, weight or size). Both groups demonstrated remarkable ability to distinguish the targeted objects (79% ~73% respectively). The point of the study was to explore both the extent of information recall in the purely haptic condition, as opposed to the visual-haptic experience, and the relative impact across modalities.

The parallel to haptic pronunciation work is striking: identifying differences in sounds or sound patterns that are, in reality, very similar and initially difficult to both perceive and produce for the learner--based to some extent on both touch and touch plus conscious visual appreciation of the objects. 

Haptic pronunciation teaching, not surprisingly, involves extensive use of about a half dozen types of touch. If we count based on technique/type x location, there are something like 400+ actual instances of the hands touching in various ways, various other "body parts." The ability to discriminate between types of touch appears to be the key--a valuable feature of  all pronunciation teaching but especially haptic work.

It works something like this. The targeted sound, a vowel, for example, is associated with:

• a position in the visual field 
• a position of one hand at that point in the visual field (at a azimuth on the compass)
• a trajectory of the other hand from in front of the larynx (voice box) to touching the other hand that varies in terms of speed and course (straight or curved) 
• some type of touch (See description of touch types below.) That is part of the information encoded with the sound which should contribute to production and recall. 

The idea, the fundamental principle of haptic pronunciation work, is that learners can more accurately recall the sound while performing the haptic "move" that accompanies it. (Research on gesture-enabled recall is compelling and extensive in several perceptual domains.)  In fact, to be most effective, when corrective feedback is provided, generally the leaner first sees the instructor perform the gestural move, termed a "pedagogical movement pattern", without the sound before performing the "haptic complex" of sound plus movement and touch themselves.

Representative haptic (variable touch-plus-gesture) gesture types and visual properties involved:

• light tap of finger tips in middle of palm 
• hold (full hands touch; no movement) 
• finger tips touch: then push in one direction 
• open hand moves/rolls around fist 
• finger nails scratch across palms 
• light touch of ball in hand 
• strong squeeze of ball in hand 
• middle fingers slide from finger tips to heel of other hand 
• finger tips tap deltoid muscle 
• finger tips tap bachio-radialis above elbows 
• feet contact with floor, either to syllable stress or heels raise on rising pitch
• hands to various points of contact on the face, collar bones, abs, etc.
• tongue, teeth, lips touched by wooden stick or hands to mark points of articulation

To see demonstrations of those haptic pedagogical movement patterns (PMPs) and learn more about haptic pronunciation teaching, join us at the next webinars on May 17th and 18th. For reservations: info@actonhaptic.com.

Source:
Association for Psychological Science. (2018, November 27). Touch can produce detailed, lasting memories. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 22, 2019 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181127092532.htm