Conducing feelings and emotions with vowels!

How's this for an opening line of a new Science Daily summary of 2014 research by Rummer and Grice entitled, Mood is linked to vowel type: The role of articulatory movements: "Ground-breaking experiments have been conduced (sic) to uncover the links between language and emotions." (Love that possible typo, "conduced," by the way--maybe something of a portmanteau between conduct and conduce perhaps? That actually unpacks the study quite well! To "conduce" means to "lead to a particular result." Science can be like that, eh!

Basically what they discovered was that if you have subjects do something like bite on a pencil (so that they come up with a smile, of sorts) or just keep repeating the high front vowel /i/ that has that

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articulatory setting while they watch a cartoon, they tend to see things as more amusing. If, on the other hand,  you have them stick the end of that pencil in their mouth so that they develop an extreme pucker, or keep repeating the vowel /o/, they tend to see things as less amusing. 

So? It has been known for decades that vowels do have phonaesthetic qualities. (See several previous blog posts.) The question has always been . . . but why? The conclusion: Because of what the facial muscles are doing while the vowel is articulated, especially as it relates to non-lexical (non word) emotional utterances. Could be, but they should have also tossed in some controls, some other vowels, too, such as having subjects use a mid, front unrounded vowel such as /ae/, as in "Bad!"-- or a high front rounded vowel, such as /ü/, as "Uber," the web-based taxi service, or a high back unrounded vowel. 

As much as I like the haptic pencil technique, which I use myself occasionally (using coffee stirs, however) for anchoring lip position with those vowels and others, there is obviously more going on here, such as the phonaesthetic qualities of the visual field. Also consider the fact that the researchers appear to be ethnically German, perhaps seriously compromising their ability to even perceive "amusing" in the first place, conducing them into that interpretation of the results. 

 

Nonetheless, an interesting and possibly useful study for us, more than mere "lip" service, to be sure. 

The body language of pronunciation teaching: Karaoke Affect

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One of the potential "turn offs" for some instructors and students in buying into the gestural and somatic basis of pronunciation work is . . . how "goofy" it looks (with apologies to Goofy, of course.) And some of it does, unquestionably. If you need to get to "goofy," you have to ramp up use of wilder gesticulation gradually, what we call "Karaoke Affect." As long as you establish the context carefully and set up good conceptual partitions, most students will come along with you . . . to goofy and beyond.

But to one who is not in the typical pronunciation teaching box, or just passing by, who has no clue what the class is about, what do the typical, gestural classroom techniques communicate: (a) clapping hands, (b) snapping fingers, (c) stretching rubber bands, (c) humming with a kazoo, (d) thumping on the desk, (e) stamping feet, (f) waving hands in the air to imitate intonation, (g) tracing lines on worksheets with fingers, (h) stepping up and down with sentence stress, (i) popping candy in the mouth on certain vowels, (j) throwing bean bags on stressed words, and (k) let alone the dozens of mouth machinations done for teaching specific vowel and consonant articulation?

According to recent research by Aviezer of Hebrew University, Trope of New York University and Todorov of Princeton University, summarized by Science Daily, it is the body that accurately communicates feelings (at least), not the face and mouth. In the study, subjects were much better at determining emotional state by focusing on movement and gesture, not looking from the neck up.

Situating and contextualizing those "bizarre" behaviours and what they communicate requires a coherent system to use them in. As we have seen in research in dozens of blog posts, it can go either way. (The EHIEP "way" is a good start, of course!) So, climb in your Karaoke Affect Box, affect your best your Eliza Doolittle, and  Show me! 

Pronunciation change: The feeling of what happens

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One of the books (and theorists) that has greatly influenced my thinking on teaching pronunciation, and especially the benchmarks in the process from the learner's perspective, is "The feeling of what happens: Body, emotion and the making of consciousness," by Antonio Damasio. To wildly oversimplify Damasio's main argument: the "feeling" or emotion underlying a thought, in neurological terms, happens before words or images come into awareness. At the time of the publication of the book, over a decade ago, that was a more striking assertion than it is today, of course, but he helped establish (or re-establish in Western thinking) the role of the body and embodiment in consciousness. (Another of his great books, Decartes' Error, earlier set out the philosophical position.)

How that figures in to haptic-integrated, more body-centered pronunciation teaching is that it sets up learner awareness to recognize when a targeted sound is at least being mispronounced--and does it in a way that generally does not disturb ongoing spontaneous speaking. As most would recognize, once a learner begins to recognize or notice the "old" pronunciation in oral output, the "game is afoot" (to quote Sherlock Holmes.)

The feeling, or haptic anchor of the sound will often be felt or experienced by the learner, momentarily, after the "error" occurs--but not before, interfering with thought and conversation. That post hoc (after the fact) monitoring is nearly certain to happen if the anchor has been well established with touch and movement and the learner has accepted the suggestion (in the best sense of hypnotic suggestion) that it is going to happen when constructive change is "afoot!" So "suggest" that benchmark to your students, and see what happens . . . or at least get a feel for it.