Getting in the right mood for enhancing your work (and even pronunciation!)

You "up" for a little meta-theory? 

Fascinating study, open source, published in Frontiers in Communication by Lai, Berkum and Hagoort: Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge. Here is the researchers' conclusion: 

"These results suggest that mood does not influence all processes involved in discourse processing. Specifically, mood does not influence lexical-semantic retrieval (N400), but it does influence elaborative processes for sense making (P600) during discourse processing."

Not quite sure how to feel about this fascinating research at this moment . . . but it should interesting from some perspective, regardless of your general mood or affect as you read about it. In essence, what the research establishes, not surprisingly, is that if you are in a rotten mood at the moment you might be better at deconstructing what follows, identifying the fudging, etc. (As it turns out, the fact that I had just gotten back from a great run on my first read of the research report may have been "colored" by all those endorphins!)

The complete structure of the study is a bit complex to unpack (but you can here, however, or check out the Neuroscience.com summary). Basically, subjects attempted to identify different features of a narrative/story working within two conditions, one more emotionally "negative;" the other, considerably less so. In effect, mood did not appear to impact their ability to focus in on details but it did influence their success at arriving at an integrated understanding or interpretation of the overall narrative or discourse. 

Does that make sense? Of course . . .  So does the application of that work to pronunciation teaching! (Actually, it almost explains a number of things and people in this field, but I'll stick to pronunciation teaching!) 

There are number of pairs of binary (or false) conceptual distinctions that are of more or less utility to us as we sit down to work on a problem as heuristics or mnemonics at best where mood (in several senses) may figure in prominently, whether the mind set of the analyst at the moment or the degree to which mood (affect/emotion et al) is subsumed in  concepts involving attention to or focus on: 

• digital vs analogical 
• accuracy vs fluency
• segmentals vs supra-segmentals
• structure vs meaning or function
• sentence-level vs discourse-level context
• experiential vs cognitive/pre-frontal engagement
• affect vs metacognitive 
• particle vs wave/field analysis
• individual vs group engagement and learning
• local vs global constructs
• visual vs auditory
• learner autonomy vs learner indoctrination 
• critical vs inquiry-based thought
• conscious vs unconscious processing
• left vs right hemisphere-like processing

And how do or should those relate to (KINETIK) pronunciation teaching and learning? Not much, if at all. What contemporary neuroscience reveals very convincingly is that overemphasis on any of those earlier, simple binary distinctions, many of them but remnants or artifacts of earlier "science,"  especially in combination, can be fatal.

Ideas don't die . . . but people (and students) do. 

Bill

Citation: Lai VT, van Berkum J and Hagoort P (2022) Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge. Front. Commun. 7:910482. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2022.910482

Killing pronunciation 12: Memory for new pronunciation: Better heard (or felt) but not seen!

Another in our series of practices that undermine effective pronunciation instruction!

Clker.com

(Maybe) bad news from visual neuroscience: You may have to dump those IPA charts, multi-colored vowel charts, technicolor xrays of the inside of mouth, dancing avatars--and even haptic vowel clocks! Well . . . actually, it may be better to think of those visual gadgets as something you use briefly in introducing sounds, for example, but then dispose of them or conceptually background them as quickly as possible.

New study by Davis et al at University of Connecticut, Making It Harder to “See” Meaning: The More You See Something, the More Its Conceptual Representation Is Susceptible to Visual Interference, summarized by Neurosciencenews.com, suggests that visual schemas of vowel sounds, for example, could be counter productive--unless of course, you close your eyes . . . but then you can't see the chart in front of you, of course. 

Subjects were basically confronted with a task where they had to try and recall a visual image or physical sensation or sound while being presented with visual activity or images in their immediate visual field. The visual "clutter" interfered substantially with their ability to recall the other visual "object" or image, but it did not impact their recall of other sensory "image" (auditory, tactile or kinesthetic) representation, such as non-visual concepts like volume or heat, or energy, etc.

We have had blogposts in the past that looked at research where it was discovered that it is more difficult to "change the channel," such that if a student is mispronouncing a sound, many times just trying to repeat the correct sound instead, with out introducing a new sensual or movement-set to accompany the new sound is not effective. In other words, an "object" in one sensory modality is difficult to just "replace," you must work around it, in effect, attaching other sensory information to it (cf multi-modal or multi-sensory instruction.)

So, according to the research, what is the problem with a vowel chart? Basically this: the target sound may be primarily accessed through the visual image, depending on the learner's cognitive preferences. I only "know" or suspect that from years of tutoring and asking students to "talk aloud" me through their strategies for remembering pronunciation of new words. It is overwhelming by way of the orthographic representation, the "letter" itself, or its place in a vowel chart or listing of some kind. (Check that out yourself with your students.)

So . .  what's the problem? If your "trail of bread crumbs" back to a new sound in memory is through a visual image of some kind, then if you have any clutter in your visual field that is the least distracting as you try to recall the sound, you are going to be much less efficient, to put it mildly. That doesn't mean you can't teach using charts, etc., but you'd better be engaging more of the multisensory system when you do or your learners' access to those sounds may be very inefficient, at best--or downgrade their importance in your method appropriately. 

In our haptic work we have known for a decade that our learners are very susceptible to being distracted by things going on in their visual field that pull their attention away from experiencing the body movement and "vibrations" in targeted parts of their bodies. Good to see "new-ol' science" is catching up with us!

I've got a feeling Davis et al are on to something there! I've also got a feeling that there are a few of you out there who may "see" some issues here that you are going to have to respond to!!!

Total recall: haptic anchoring and integration vs cross-modal reinforcement of pronunciation

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

There are an almost infinite number of ways to create heuristics to assist learners in attending to and remembering sounds. For a good overview of suggestions as to how that works in different modalities in teaching phonetics and pronunciation, see this 2011 summary by Wrembel and Mickiewicz  of the University of Poznan. From that perspective, in EHIEP there are half a dozen or so modalities involved: sound, movement, touch, positioning in the visual field (which includes associated colours), sensations of resonance in the bones, muscles and flesh of the vocal tract--even olfaction in the form of aromatic hand creams, or "taste" with mint breath strips in some cases. It is one thing to anchor a sound using a color or phonaesthetic word association or gesture in teaching a sound, as in phonetics, yet quite another to systematically integrate that into classroom instruction. In other words, "cross-modal" reinforcement (linking sound to some other sense) makes very good sense but it just the beginning. That association has to be both balanced appropriately, so that one does not cancel the other modalities (an important issue - See previous posts) and scaffolded in over time. In EHIEP, the "haptic anchoring" (a convenient short cut for full-body, multi-modal engagement) is employed in class or in personal practice regularly, whenever required,  for presentation, correction, practice or integration . . .  total (sensory) recall!