Drawing on drawing to enhance learning of sounds and pronunciation

About 40 years ago, in working with dyslexia in the family, specifically elementary school reading and spelling tests, we stumbled onto the idea of, in effect, forming the letters of the alphabet for the words on the spelling list that week--with the body, in cheerleader or ballet-like fashion. Our "alphabeteer" became lightning fast. The technique worked well, or at least it helped.

Drawing on the concept of the "body alphabet", creating stylized body movement that iconically represented letters and sounds, we developed the haptic pronunciation teaching system, beginning in about 1985. New gestures were created that visually and somatically represented in tangible and recognizable ways, sounds, graphemes and a range of phonological processes, such as vowels, phrasing of syllables and intonation patterning. Those routines were intentionally designed to not carry common problematic social meanings, such as waving goodbye or signalling some degree of pleasure or displeasure.

Just read a remarkable piece of neuroscience research that seems to get at some of the critical, underlying mechanisms involved: Relating visual production and recognition of objects in human visual cortex, by Fan, et al. (2019).

Quoting the summary from Science Daily:

"As the participants drew each object multiple times, (line drawings of pieces of furniture) the activity patterns in (visual) occipital cortex remained unchanged, but the connection between occipital cortex and parietal cortex, an area involved in motor planning, grew more distinct. This suggests that drawing practice enhances how the brain shares information about an object between different regions over time. . .This means people recruit the same neural representation of an object whether they are drawing it or seeing it."

Especially for the more kinaesthetic among us, sketching, allowing the pen or brush, or the body itself a more prominent role in supporting memory can be wonderfully enabling and effective. One has to wonder, however, what we are doing to our collective memories and coming generations as we "hand off" more and more of our primary encoding and recalling to our essentially visual-auditory smartphone interfaces. Research on that question and the general interconnectivity between areas of the brain is extensive and growing rapidly.

The implications of that observation and many like it recently are paradigm changing. Much of what we have come to understand as relatively isolated sections and functions of the brain, and by extension our behavior, are really anything but. The bad news and the good news:

In effect, everything we experience at any given moment can contribute substantially to what is later remembered and recalled. We, as educators or influencers, are accountable for much more, but, on the other hand, we now have license to do more as well.

v5.0 of the haptic system is about to launch. It does more . . .

Keep in touch!


Full Reference:
Judith E. Fan, Jeffrey D. Wammes, Jordan B. Gunn, Daniel L. K. Yamins, Kenneth A. Norman and Nicholas B. Turk-Browne, Journal of Neuroscience 23 December 2019, 1843-19; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1843-19.2019

Drawing (and anchoring prominence) on the left side of the brain

Several earlier posts have referred to the "meaning" of the visual field, including the optimal placement of vowel schema in the visual field. Any number of visualized models of psychological and social systems have been represented on similar X~Y axes, with process being located on the X axis and positioning, on the Y axis. For example, many popular characterizations of personality preferences, management or cognitive style can be situated in that conceptual field.

Clip art: Clker

                                                  External  


  
                               Stability                         Change 




                                                  Internal  

In the 2007 study by Des Roches et al. (linked above; available in Abstract form only), it was discovered that when processing novelty, the right eye/left hemisphere was favoured. When the image was demonstrably negative (rather than positive) in emotional loading, there was a tendency for processing to favor the right hemisphere/left eye. The same general asymmetry appeared to be present when presented with analogous olfactory stimuli as well. (To avoid the problems of culture, individual variability and language, the research was done using 38 Arabian mares.)
          Not coincidentally, in the EHIEP framework,  anchoring of word stress, phrasal stress, discourse prominence and "front" vowels is done in the right visual field (Back vowels, however, are anchored in the left visual field, a mirror image of the typical IPA matrix display.) New information is generally anchored to the right on all protocols. Given information and emotional setting is usually established first in the left visual field.
         Most interesting--and novel study!  The research appears to provide further support for systematic exploitation of the visual field in HICP work--simply by having put the "chart" before the horse!

Drawing emotional gesture and intonation

Clip art: CLker

Here is an interesting description of what is termed, "gesture drawing" which seems quite analogous to what are termed "touch-i-namis" in EHIEP (wave-like gestures through the visual field terminating in hands touching): " . . . creating a gesture drawing . . . , you should draw, not what the thing looks like, but what it is doing. You need to 'sense' the thing that you are drawing. Is it fluid and soft, or spiky and hard? Is it coiled like a spring, or off-center and asymmetric, or is it solid and balanced?"

Notice the phrases "sense . . . what it is doing." In our work, that is generally experienced or interpreted as expressiveness, the dynamic nature of the targeted sound. The learner is guided to produce with as much resonance as possible--and later recall--what the sound(s) is doing, its felt sense, not what it looks like or sounds like.