Effortless pronunciation learning: a la The Matrix!

(Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller, NSF)

Clip art: Clker

According to this ScienceDaily summary: " . . . it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise." That may be a bit over the top, but note this: "The most surprising thing in this study is that mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specific visual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature, without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned." The "skills" being enhanced in this research by basically implanting neural routines in the brain were essentially visual, such as ability to discriminate fine detail, but it looks impressive: "The result, say researchers, is a novel learning approach sufficient to cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that require visual performance." The extension to aural and tactile mapping is only a matter of time. In fact it is easy to see it working with the EHIEP vowel matrix.

Putting pronunciation back in the box (and the visual-haptic field)

Clip art: Clker

Over the last few years (and in several earlier posts) I have played with different visual-haptic representations of the sound system of English from a clock shape to a 3x3 matrix. The 1997 study by Coello and Grealy helps resolve the issue. Most recently, we have focussed on anchoring the matrix as precisely as possible, moving away from the earlier "clock man" model which, although it connects up very quickly for learners to the general spatial orientation of the clock, it has turned out to be nearly impossible to consistently locate fixed points accurately on and within it. (That includes the pedagogical movement patterns associated with the vowel system, intonation, rhythm, pitch and some other elements of the expressive system of English.) The research seems to explain why the matrix is ultimately preferable: when the visual field was defined (marked out visually in front of subjects), angular--as opposed to circular movements--were shown to be significantly more accurate. That concept may apply with any visual schema that we use in teaching. Metaphorically and analogically, the whole notion of "seeing" pronunciation work through a somewhat more "digital" lens is long overdue, especially as technology begins its inexorable invasion and takeover of the (visual and methodological) field. There is apparently still hope for all us "squares" out there . . . 

Feeling spacey teaching pronunciation? Not a bad idea!

Clip art: Clker

One of the basic principles of HICP is that space in the visual field can be haptically-anchored to distinctions between sounds and sound patterns in language. Consequently, precision of pedagogical movements in the visual field and points of reference where hands touch or a hand touches part of the arm or upper body is paramount.

A number of posts have referred to the neurological "overlapping" in visual and haptic process in the brain. In other words, sight and touch are intricately interwoven. In the 2007 review by Pelli and TiIlman summarized by Science Daily.com from the journal, Nature, the concept of "critical spacing" is used to highlight the fact that spacing beween visual entities is apparently much more important to visual discrimination than is size. (Other research suggests the same for color as well.)

What that implies for our work is that establishing the optimal visual and haptic distance between vowels such as high-front-tense 'i' and high-front-lax 'I' should be very important for anchoring, encoding and recall. (How that then relates to resonance, tongue and jaw movement, and vowel quality is, of course, a very interesting question, as well!)  In recent work I have begun to very carefully reassess the relative locations of all PMPs.

That focus has been very revealing. Some of it was motivated by learners who reported being seriously confused when, in an instructional video, my execution of the PMP and contact node for one of the vowels, the "critical space," varied by a couple of inches. A "feel" for visual space is potentially a very powerful tool, indeed.