Retraining your brain to hear in your TL🤸‍♀️🧠

How to learn a sound that doesn't exist in your first language

My sixth-grade students are currently preparing for their presentations, an extension of a science unit they recently completed on the food chain. I allow them to research any animal they’re interested in, including those not mentioned in their textbooks. Naturally, I receive numerous inquiries about the English names of various animals. From blobfish to pink fairy armadillos, there are many animals I don’t even recognize in Japanese. 

They have discovered that it saves time to ask Google sensei directly first and then have me verify. I don’t mind this as it teaches them how to be independent learners and I pretty much do the same thing with Japanese. As one pair was annotating their speeches, they found amusement in the repeated mishearing of ‘honey badger’ as ‘honey baachan’ (the Japanese word for grandma) from the text-to-speech feature. And while it can seem like them being silly and unfocused, it is actually an authentic occurrence resulting from perceptual narrowing. 

A baby study participant wearing an EEG cap in Dr. Janet Werker’s Infant Studies Centre.

As baby brains grow and develop, their capacity to recognize differences in phonetic sounds begin to narrow depending on their native language, or the languages that they are frequently exposed to by the humans around them. In fact, researchers found that the decline in discrimination of these non-native speech sounds occurs between 6 and 10 months of age (Werker & Tees, 1984).

For instance, the Japanese language does not differentiate between the English “l” and “r” sounds, treating them as one sound. Therefore, a Japanese baby who frequently hears Japanese spoken around them will gradually lose the ability to distinguish between these two sounds, since this distinction is not important in their native language. My students who were once Japanese babies themselves, probably weren’t that exposed to the /dʒər/ (jer) sound in English as either so they tried to make sense of it with another sound that they were familiar with.

🧠🎵 Retraining your brain to hear

If you compare your target language to your native language or even languages that you are native-like in, how do they differ phonetically? This brings us to the bigger question — how do we train ourselves to hear something that we don’t normally hear?

Hearing a sound accurately and producing it accurately create a feedback loop. You make a sound, hear it, adjust your pronunciation, and repeat. Here are a few ways to do this:

Listen and Repeat: The first step is to listen carefully to the sound as it’s pronounced in the target language. We can do this by making a list of the words containing the sound and repeating the it as many times as possible. Dictionaries with pronunciation features like Forvo may be good for this.

Phonetic Breakdown: If we have an understanding where in the mouth or throat the sound we are learning is made (point of articulation), and what type of sound it is (plosive, fricative, etc.), it can help us practice them.

Use Visualization: Visualizing the way how the mouth, tongue, and throat should move when making the sound can be helpful. There are a plethora find diagrams and videos online that show the precise movements needed to produce certain sounds. Seeing Speech even has MRI viewing options.

Record Yourself: Record yourself making the sound and then listening to it can help identify differences between your pronunciation and the native one.

Practice: Once you’ve mastered the sound on its own, you’ll need to practice saying it in all of the various combinations of words in which you might encounter it. This is the hardest part, so don’t give up easily!

Feedback: Get feedback from a native speaker, if possible. They will be able to correct your pronunciation and give you tips on how to improve.