Shownotes
In this episode Dr Bisson speaks with Dr Angelos Lengeris about phonological abilities and their importance for language learning. Join us to hear about how we can train our ear to hear sounds that do not exist in our native language and how this then helps us speak with a more "native-like" accent.
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Visit Dr Lengeris research webpage or get in touch via email: A.Lengeris@phil.uoa.gr
Link to research article on training phonological abilities
Transcripts
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
If you have a connection to languages, this is a podcast for you. Whether you're a language learner, a language teacher, a language researcher, or anyone who's interested in languages.
I'm Dr.Marie-Josee Bisson and alongside Dr. Kaitlyn Zavaleta, we are the language scientists and this is our podcast. We are senior lecturers in psychology at De Montfort University, and we conduct research in the area of language learning. Throughout the series, we had to translate the science behind language learning into informative and useful practical advice. So sit back and enjoy. Today we are joined by Dr. Angelos Lengeris from the University of Athens, and he's here to talk to us about phonological abilities. So welcome, Angelos.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Hi. Thank you very much for having me.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
It's a pleasure. Now, Angela, Angela's completed his undergraduate degree in the Greek literature and classics at the University of Athens and then a Master's and Ph.D. in phonetics at University College, London. And before we jump into the topics of phonetics and phonology, can you tell us a little bit about your language background?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Yes. So I'm I'm Greek. I can speak English and German, and I know ancient Greek and Latin from my undergraduate years, as you said before.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, that's quite a few languages already. We we didn't expect any more than that. That's okay.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
You know, it's this, you know, discussion about if you say you're a linguist, how many languages do you speak and they expect from you to to know like ten or 12 or something like that?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
No, I had no expectations. I obviously knew that you speak Greek in English, but I didn't know you spoke German. So there you go. And then all the ancient languages as well. So how did you become a language researcher? Because you went from studying literature and classics to jumping into phonetics?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Yes, well, I was always into languages and I studied Greek philology at the University of Athens. So there are three specialisations. Classics, linguistics and modern Greek. And you have to choose at the end of your first year what you're going to be doing. So I chose classics, which means I didn't take that many linguistic courses, but the ones that I took I really enjoyed. So, you know, I was fascinated by phonetics. And, you know, for someone who spent a couple of years examining ancient texts and to memorising information, to start doing phonetics and start recording and analysing speech and doing graphs and tables and stats, you know, it felt so refreshing and new and modern. So I switched to phonetics. I, you know, I went to UCL and I did phonetics and then continued in that field.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yes. And that's, that's how you came into my radar, in fact, because I needed some help with one of my research projects. I was interested in phonological abilities. And then I saw your name on one of the research papers and I got in touch and we got together and worked on this really interesting project. So she would talk about the phonological abilities then. So how what are they?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Yes, there are many phonological abilities and there are different definitions and categorisations. I don't think we have the time to go into detail now. You know, we've got phonological awareness, phonological memory and so on. What I'm working on, I think you will be interested in is the perception and pronunciation in a second language or a foreign language. So how good we are in perceiving speech, vowels, consonants, intonation and so on, and how good we are in pronouncing speech. So who's better and why someone is better in perceiving and pronouncing speech, and also how we can use computers to improve our perception and pronunciation.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So why is that particularly problematic for people when they come to learn another language?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Well, it all has to do. I mean, there are so many different factors, but the most important one is the relationship, your native language and the other language. So there are not in principle, there are, you know, difficult sounds. Okay. There could be a few like articulate, very difficult sounds to pronounce. Like, for example, in Greek we have the R sound same in Spanish and other languages. So this could be a bit problematic for our speakers who don't have this sound in their native language. But generally speaking, all the sounds are, you know, relatively easy if you do have this sound to your native language. So the problem is when you have a contrast which you don't have in your native language. So for example, in Greek and in Spanish and Italian and so on, we only have a single E sound. So there's no distinction between e and a. So for me, I contrast like in F, double E, L and f I double l, so feel and fail. So I would pronounce it. So if I, if I want to use my Greek accent, it would be something like feel. So now I'm using my Greek e and you don't know which one is it?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
It's in between isn't?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Exactly, something in between. It's the same with z and shu if you don't have it in your native language. The same with the row and low for Japanese learners of English, for example. So the problem is when you when there are two sounds in the second language and you only have one in your native language, and obviously, you know, you can become better after spending a couple of years learning the language and so on. So there are other factors we can talk about. But yeah, that's that's that's the main problem. Yes. It's always, you know, other things like motivation and your willingness to learn and so on. But, you know, one of the first things that we look at is this relationship between L1 and L2. L1 stands for native language and L2 for Second Language.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So it's kind of a problem at the physical and psychological level as well. So you can literally not hear some of the differences between some letters when it's not your native language. And also, if you can't hear them, then you can't pronounce them accurately either.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Exactly. So when I first moved to in the UK in London, I, I couldn't hear the difference between these two E sounds, you know, the, the difference between cat and cut. So cut or cat. But it was the same for me. But after a couple of weeks or months, I started picking up those differences. And then obviously by studying phonetics, that helped a lot.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So what can people do then? Because I think your research shows that. Well, I don't think I know that your research shows that these phonological abilities can be trained.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Yeah. More generally, what myself and many other people have done, and we know that for a long 30 years now. So we do know that people can improve their perception by applying extensive training protocols. So and computers can help us in can help us in that direction. So we know that after doing a couple of sessions, you can improve your perception. So you can start listening to those tiny well, they're not tiny, but for foreign learners, these are tiny differences and you can improve your perception. And the the fascinating thing is that you can also improve your pronunciation. So as you said before, you first need to be able to tell the difference between two sounds and then you can start pronouncing those differences. So basically what we do is that we, we play sounds, we play words to trainees. So for example, it could be something like feel so F, double e, L and then there are a couple of options on the screen. So the trainee has to pick which one is it. So we've got feel, fail and we've got fell and so on. So the training listens to this word, to a word, and then he or she has to pick which one is it? And then the computer will tell him or her whether it was right or wrong. And as I said before, we so we have the feedback. So you know what you did well or when you did well and you can also listen to the same word again. But as I said before, the important bit is variability. So we do need variability in words and we also need variability in speakers. So we have multiple native speakers of the target language saying all these multiple words. So in a way, you know, we try to simulate what would happen in in real life, but this is more focused because you can imagine if you listen to, you know, the stream of speech, you hear so many vowels and consonant, it's very difficult to focus on a single vowel or consonant. But by playing isolated words, then you can focus on this vowel, that vowel or this consonant or that consonant.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And how much better do people get by doing this training?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Typically we do from, let's say, 5 to 10 sessions in a week or two weeks that last about half an hour. So it's not that long if you think about it's like two or three or 4 hours of training. And so we have found that people improve about 20 percentage points after training, which may sound not that large, but it is. So basically, you know, if you go from 60% correct to the target vowels, consonants and you go to 8% correct, then you can imagine this a big difference. And this is only after a couple of sessions. So, you know, I suspect that if we were to give more training to our trainees, they would improve a bit more. We usually don't do that because we don't have the time and it's not that practical to have to because the way we do it, we do a pre-test, so we test them before they do the training, and then they do five or six or seven training sessions and we would get them back to the lab and then they'd do another test. So this is seven in total. It's say so it's not that easy to get so many people doing all these sessions, although I have to say now with, you know, with smartphones and iPods and tablets and so on. We can, they can, do that at home. Yeah.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I was going to ask you about that. How how easily accessible this sort of training is.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
It's really easy in the sense that if you do have the program, if you have recorded the words, you can do it at home. But I also have to admit that, you know, this high variability approach has not been adopted by learners and teachers alike. I mean, obviously, teachers do that for years now. It's not like a rocket science. It's like playing minimal to people. And then they try to listen and they try to pronounce things. But the the different things that you you have this, you know, multiple words and some variable environment and so on. So it's very focused and sort of you can imagine it's very helpful in foreign language settings. So for example, when you learn English here in Greece or you learn English in Italy, in those cases, even the teachers are not native speakers in most cases. So you do you do not have inputs from native speakers, which is very important because as you can imagine, if you if you do listen to someone like a Greek teacher saying feel, fail, there is no way of you, how could you learn the difference between feel and fail?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Absolutely. So it sounds to me like this sort of resources would be really, really beneficial if it was implemented properly. And from what you're saying, I think there are lots of apps on the market, but what you're saying is they're not evidence based and they are not based on research findings. So they probably don't have the amount of variability that's required for people to really improve.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Exactly. Exactly. And I'm sure your audience knows that there are so many hundreds or even thousands of apps like you may have heard about accent reduction programs in so on. So these are very fancy and colourful and they look nice. But most of them, if not all of them, I would say they are not research based. So we don't know whether they work or not. And most of them are very expensive too, so.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Well, yeah, that's another problem, isn't it? So there might be an interesting research project to be done there. Compare some of these fancy apps and actually conduct the research and see if they do work. Or we could actually make something up based on research findings and try to put it out there, open access for people. But then, as you say, it's the problem with that is there's just you need to prepare a lot of material and it's obviously language specific. So you need lots of native speakers of all these languages. Yeah. And then lots of recordings of the same words because when we when we speak well, you can probably you know more about this than me, but when we say even the same speaker saying the same words on multiple occasions, it will sound slightly different each time. And this is this is what we're talking about.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
That's, that's a good thing that this is what we want. Because there is this variablility in real speech.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And so in order to train ourselves, we need to be able to hear lots of different tokens or lots of different examples of these words pronounced slightly differently by multiple people, sometimes by the same people, so that we can train our ear to to really fine tune those, those differences.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Exactly. But having said that, I mean, there are so many platforms, online platforms that you can use now. So you can record speech and you can play speech. So as long as you can find native speakers to pronounce those difficult for your target group sounds, it should be it's not that difficult to do.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So we talked a little bit earlier, as you say, about well, we talked about training people's perception. Can you tell us a little bit more about how the training works for pronunciation?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Mm hmm. That's the beauty of it. You don't have to train pronunciation at all. So there are a couple of studies that try to train pronunciation. So, you know, put your tongue here, do that or round your lips and so on. But what we know is that when people improve their perception and or this high variability approach that I talk to you about is all about perception. So they listen to sounds and they click buttons and that's it. So this is perception training. And the good thing about it is that this improvement transfers to pronunciation without being given any explicit pronunciation training. So people get better just by being able to perceive those differences. So basically in the pre-test that I mentioned before, we not only test people's perception before the training, but we also record them. So they they pronounce a couple of words or sentences and and then they do the training and then we call the same people on the same words or it, you know, slightly different words. And then we have we can perform a phonetic and acoustic analysis to see the acoustic characteristics of those sounds. Or we can have native speakers of English or any other language target language to assess those productions. And so we can, you know, calculate the difference between pre-training and post-training.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah. So you've been able to measure how much better they become at their pronunciation
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Exactly.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Just by training their their ability to discriminate fine tuned sounds. And we talked a little bit earlier as well about how people vary in terms of their how good they are at this, this phonological ability thing. Could you expand on that?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Yes, we do find individual variation. And obviously, you know, when you when you run an experiment, you try to control of all the things. So they should have or they they do have they are at the same level. But then again, pronunciation is a bit tricky because you could have like C1 or C2 students who they are, you know, there grammar and syntax and so on, their vocabulary is really good, but the pronunciation is not that good. So it's a bit difficult, but still. So we try to control for everything, but we, we still find, I'd say, huge individual differences between people.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So when we talk about some people having an ear for language, are we talking about phonological abilities?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Yes, it's a very difficult question. As you can imagine, there have been studies that try to relate this ability to different types of measures. There are so many different types of measures that have been tried. One of the things that I tried a couple of years ago, and this is the task that we used in in your project as well, is to have people listen to something like a tone that changes in frequency. So this wasn't a speech sound, this was just a sound, a tone. And we measured we try to see whether some people are better in this tone than others. And there were. Obviously there were differences between people. And then we tried to correlate your ability to listen to those tiny differences in words, in frequency between those tones to your ability to perceive vowels and consonant speech, basically. And we did find a correlation in that. So yeah, there are other things that have been tried, things like musical ability. So if people, you know, people who are good in music or they have studied music are also better in perception and pronunciation, there are some conflicting results. But yeah, this seems to be one of the things that could play a role so how good your ear is. And obviously we have we have tried to do other hearing tasks. So these people, generally speaking, you know, their hearing is fine, but when you make a very, very difficult task. So we are talking about 5 to 10 or 15 hertz difference between those tones and those people who are really good in this task were also found to be good in our perceiving speech.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah. And we saw in our, in the project that we did together Angelos that it also predicted their ability to learn words in a foreign language. Yeah. And the task, as you say, was really quite
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Demanding.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Very demanding. The differences were so subtle between the two, the two beeps that you use. It sounded like beeps on that day that people, and they'd had to say whether they were the same or different. But, even when they were different, the differences were so small that it was a very difficult task. And we saw that there was a huge range of individual differences. So some people were better than others at perceiving those small differences. And also we saw that the how good they were at perceiving small differences predicted their ability to learn words in a new foreign language that they'd not been exposed to before. So it seems like phonological abilities are really important and I mean their really important to be able to pronounce words accurately in a foreign language, but also to help you learn words in a foreign language too. So Angelos, what do you want our listeners to remember from from today's episode on Phonological Abilities?
Dr Angelos Lengeris
I do have a very positive and encouraging message for for learners out there. So, you know, there is this idea that there is a window of opportunity. So when you pass this window, when you hit puberty, it's very difficult to improve your perception and pronunciation. And we do know that obviously when you when you are older, it's it becomes a bit more difficult. But we do have so many studies that I talked about that show that even adults and I didn't mention that. I think. So all these studies that are are done with adults. Okay. So they do show that this little window of opportunity is not closed, it's not lost. And our brain can support learning even in adulthood, and we can improve relatively easily provided that we do have, we do use, you know. An appropriate training method.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So it's not too late for us adults to learn another language. We can get good at it.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Oh, yeah, of course. Of course. At least as far as the phonetics perception pronunciation concerned.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
All right. I thank you for joining us today, Angelos, and for telling us about from phonological abilities.
Dr Angelos Lengeris
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
In the next podcasts we will be talking about randomised controlled trials with Professor Matthew Inglis. I just want to remind you to take 5 minutes to go into our shownotes and click on the link for our survey. The survey will tell us what you liked about the series and what you would like to hear about next. Thank you for listening and thank you to the British Academy for funding our podcast. I'm Dr. Marie-Josee Bisson, and you've been listening to the Language Scientist podcast.
