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- All Subjects: Neurosciences
- Status: Published
This foundational study designs a sensorimotor approach to pronunciation pedagogy and tests its effect on the L2 speech of five adult (late) learners of American English. Throughout an eight week classroom experiment, participants from different first language backgrounds received instruction on Articulatory Settings (Honickman, 1964) and the sensorimotor mechanism of speech acquisition (Waldron 2010; Guenther et al., 2006). In addition, they attended five adapted lessons of the Feldenkrais technique (Feldenkrais, 1972) designed to develop sensorimotor awareness of the vocal apparatus and improve the quality of L2 speech movement. I hypothesize that such sensorimotor learning triggers overall positive changes in the way L2 learners deal with speech articulators for L2 and that over time they develop better pronunciation.
After approximately eight hours of intervention, analysis of results shows participants’ improvement in speech rate, degree of accentedness, and speaking confidence, but mixed changes in word intelligibility and vowel space area. Albeit not statistically significant (p >.05), these results suggest that such a sensorimotor approach to L2 phonological acquisition warrants further consideration and investigation for use in the L2 classroom.
The distinctions between the neural resources supporting speech and music comprehension have long been studied using contexts like aphasia and amusia, and neuroimaging in control subjects. While many models have emerged to describe the different networks uniquely recruited in response to speech and music stimuli, there are still many questions, especially regarding left-hemispheric strokes that disrupt typical speech-processing brain networks, and how musical training might affect the brain networks recruited for speech after a stroke. Thus, our study aims to explore some questions related to the above topics. We collected task-based functional MRI data from 12 subjects who previously experienced a left-hemispheric stroke. Subjects listened to blocks of spoken sentences and novel piano melodies during scanning to examine the differences in brain activations in response to speech and music. We hypothesized that speech stimuli would activate right frontal regions, and music stimuli would activate the right superior temporal regions more than speech (both findings not seen in previous studies of control subjects), as a result of functional changes in the brain, following the left-hemispheric stroke and particularly the loss of functionality in the left temporal lobe. We also hypothesized that the music stimuli would cause a stronger activation in right temporal cortex for participants who have had musical training than those who have not. Our results indicate that speech stimuli compared to rest activated the anterior superior temporal gyrus bilaterally and activated the right inferior frontal lobe. Music stimuli compared to rest did not activate the brain bilaterally, but rather only activated the right middle temporal gyrus. When the group analysis was performed with music experience as a covariate, we found that musical training did not affect activations to music stimuli specifically, but there was greater right hemisphere activation in several regions in response to speech stimuli as a function of more years of musical training. The results of the study agree with our hypotheses regarding the functional changes in the brain, but they conflict with our hypothesis about musical expertise. Overall, the study has generated interesting starting points for further explorations of how musical neural resources may be recruited for speech processing after damage to typical language networks.