Вниманы! Highly emotional L2 pronunciation teaching! (Ah . . . forget it!)

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Every language has at least one expression that gets its message across better than most all other languages, emotionally and phonaesthetically. In Russian, for me at least, one is "Вниманы or Vnimanie!" (Attention!) Said with the right emotional "zing," it can "grab" the attention like no expression I have ever experienced.

Optimal holding and systematic management of learner attention and emotion is the foundation of haptic pronunciation work. (See earlier post.) It is often assumed, however, that simply the more emotion involved in language teaching or learning, the better; the better words and meanings are remembered. Turns out, not surprisingly, that is really not the case.

Research by Schirmer, Chen, Ching, Tan, Ryan and Hong (2012), summarized by Science Daily,  investigating the impact of emotion in the spoken voice on memory for words and meanings, confirms what common sense tells us: sometimes strong emotion either "clouds" or "enhances" both understanding and memory. In that study, subjects were wired with fMRIs and shown and heard spoken words with varying degrees and kinds of emotion.

In one condition " . . . participants recognized (the actual) words better when they had previously heard them in the neutral (relatively unemotional) tone compared with the sad tone." However, expressions spoken with more emotion captured subjects' attention better and were recognized more quickly later. In addition, women were better at recognizing emotionally loaded words than men. In effect, emotion seemed to enhance memory for meaning but  downgrade recall of specific words. The brain mapping confirmed the differential processing of the emotion-loaded targets. That makes sense. Emotion is more a discourse function, relating to context and the story.

In the context of language learning this research might suggest that emotion in the voice would enhance listening comprehension, for example--but perhaps not pronunciation or even remembering specific vocabulary. That has always been one of the "conundrums" of using drama in language teaching or highly "gesticular" routines: they do seem to improve general expressiveness, confidence, rhythm, and intonation but not pronunciation of individual words or even memory for them. It is not because attention isn't focused on the target but that the emotion involved simply directs attention elsewhere in the brain.

So what is the bottom line here? It is apparently this: Sometimes drawing learners' attention to pronunciation to be learned and remembered with various emotional overlays and highlights may be fun, stimulating and a good change of pace (and still worth doing, of course, for other reasons) but in the long run  . . . not all that memorable (unlike this post, of course!) That does not mean that the sterile language lab of old or the web-based "drilling machines" are the answer but that pronunciation teaching must generally be embedded in authentic communication where emotion and attention to form occur naturally and systematically--like in your classroom?

Citation:
Springer Science+Business Media. (2012, December 11). Emotion in voices helps capture listener's attention, but in the long run the words are not remembered as accurately. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 22, 2016 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121211112742.htm

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. 

Haptic solutions: [i] versus [I] - Not even close to a close vowel!

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Got any students who have difficulty making or hearing the distinction between [i] and [I] or [u] and [U]? In articulatory and perceptual terms, those two pairs of vowels are problematic for learners from many different L1s. Phonetic descriptions refer to [i] and [u] as close vowels; the other two are said to be done with the tongue "not so close" to the roof of the mouth.

Advice to learners on how to produce the differences ranges from "Smile more on [i]" or "Round your lips more on [u]," to "Tense your jaw more on one," etc. Vowel charts typically have them located very close together visually, often in the same high-front or high-back box. (Why the IPA chart or something close to it is used for learners has always been a mystery to me. Probably something to do with the linguists who set it up?) As explored in several earlier blogposts, even the choice of the left to right (front to back) lay out of the vowel chart is apparently arbitrary--and from a phonaesthetic perspective, probably backwards. (EHIEP does go right-to-left, in fact.)

The importance of spatial positioning in anchoring conceptual and emotional "closeness" has just been highlighted in a new study by Maglio at the university of Toronto-Scarborough and colleagues, briefly and informally summarized by our friends at ScienceDaily.com: " . . . something that feels close in one way, such as physical distance, will also feel close in time, probability, and social similarity." 

In the case of haptic vowel positioning, the opposite should apply; those perceived as more haptically dissimilar should be easier to distinguish and produce. In the EHIEP system, those pairs of vowels are experientially "distanced" by: 

1. Being visually distinct: [i] is represented as [iy]; [I], as [I]

2. Pedagogical movement patterns that are very different. On [iy] the left hand had brushes by the right hand (positioned at 1 o'clock in the visual field) and continues on to just above the middle of the forehead at the hair line. On [I], the left hand lightly taps the right hand, positioned at 2 o'clock. 

3. The typical student reaction to learning the haptic distinctions between close and non-close vowels  involved being something like "Those vowels are really not that close at all!" Exactly. 

See demonstrations of double smooth (tense vowel + off-glide) and single rough vowels (simple lax or tense vowel) there on Vimeo.com or on the AH-EPS website. If a demo is password-accessible only by the time you go to look at it, email info@actonhaptic.com for temporary access.

Stay close; keep in touch. 

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!

Giving aural comprehension "a hand"-- in haptic pronunciation training

A common question we get is something to the effect of "How do the pedagogical gestures (PMPs - movement across the visual field terminating in touch on a stressed element of a word) work?" 2012 research by Turkeltaub and colleagues at Georgetown University, reported by Science Daily, suggests how that happens. In that study
it was demonstrated that what you are doing with your hands may affect what you hear, or at least how quickly you hear it.

In essence, subjects were instructed to respond by touching a button when they detected a heavily embedded background sound, either with their right or left hand. Right handed response was better at detecting fast-changing sounds; the left, better at slow changing sounds, according to Turkeltaub, " . . . the left hemisphere likes rapidly changing sounds, such as consonants, and the right hemisphere likes slowly changing sounds, such as syllables or intonation . . . " Well, maybe . . .

The study at least further establishes the potential connection between haptic work and L2 sound change. In this case, when the learner performs a PMP, mirroring the model and listening to the model of the target sound--without overt speaking--anchoring should be enhanced, more efficient. Part of the reason for that, as reported in several pervious posts, is that "fast" sounds tend to be in the right visual field (attached to the left hemisphere) and "slower" sounds, the left.

AMPISys, Inc. 

In the EHIEP protocol for intonation, for example, the intonation contour or tone group begins in the left visual field with the left hand moving to the right until it touching the right hand on the stressed syllable or focus word. (See Intonation PMP demonstration linked off earlier post.) In the vowel protocols, similar PMPS are involved as well as the visual display reflects the "fast and slow" phonaesthetic quality of the vowels. (See earlier post on that as well.)

Keep in touch! (v2.0 will be released next week!)

The "touch-ture" of haptic pronunciation teaching

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A new study by researchers from Laboratoire de psychologie et neurocognition (LPNC) (CNRS/Université Pierre Mendès France/ Savoie University) in collaboration with Geneva University's Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l'éducation and Les Doigts Qui Rêvent (Dreaming Fingers) in Talant (Côte-d'Or, France), reported by Science Daily, demonstrated the positive impact of variable texture on image comprehension in blind children. In essence, by providing materials with different, distinctive surface textures for the hands to survey, subjects were able to learn and recall more effectively. Research has long established that the blind develop superior touch-based senses that serve to replace visual--often in the same areas of the visual cortex as the sighted use.

The same principle should also apply to the application of touch and movement in our work. In the EHIEP (Essential haptic-integrated English pronunciation) approach, there are "roughly" a dozen distinct types of touch, each having its own texture. In principle, the "touch-tures" are related to the phonaesthetic and somatic qualities of the sound or sound process. For example:

For lax, or short vowels (such as: I, ae, a, Ə, U), the "touch-ture" is a light tap of both hands

For tense vowels+off glide (such as iy, ey, ay, ow, uw), the "touch-ture" is a brushing motion of one hand across the other as the first part of the vowel is pronounced. The moving hand then continues on to a location in the visual field associated with either glide, w or y.

We often have learners close their eyes or use eye tracking as they execute various pedagogical movement patterns across the visual field in presenting or correcting pronunciation. More focused attention to the "felt sense" or "touch-ture" of the hands in the process and the attendant vocal resonance has always been understood to be very important. Here is more evidence why. Keep in touch. 

Synesthesia alert: No magnetic letters on your refrigerator!

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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.

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.)

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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

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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! 

Semiotics of the visual field

Here is a research study that uses the "Personal Styles Inventory" in exploring the personality traits of subjects arrested for DWI. (My colleague and mother-in-law) Dr Corrine Cope, was instrumental in developing the conceptual framework, depicted in the octagon below, for identifying the relationship between  traits in an individual. The layout of the sectors of the PSI octagon is strikingly similar to the underlying bases of visual representations of many psychological and philosophical systems: the basic "meaning" of the vertical/horizontal axes. (Note the  simple External/Internal ~ Change/Stability figure at the bottom.) 

From several earlier posts examining the character or tendencies inherent in the various areas in the visual field (See  links to visual metaphor usage, NLP, OEI and phonaesthetics), it has been acknowledged that anchoring or retrieving a sound or process higher or lower--or more to the left or the right-- in front of the learner should make a difference. The meanings of the PSI octagon sectors provide a fascinating template for mapping on the felt sense of the vowel system of a language . . . as long as the front vowels are to the right as in EHIEP vowel displays, rather than to the left as is traditionally charted by phoneticians.