Language

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Most scientists agree that language is a particularly human trait. Many believe it to be one of the defining characteristics of humans, one of the few abilities that sets us apart from other animals. Because of this, understanding language, how it is learned, how it can be improved and what goes wrong with it, is both an immensely complex and an incredibly important task. Hearing the sounds of languages is fundamentally important for developing language skills. This has to be learned and can be trained. Doing so can result in improved language learning, which is the cornerstone of all other learning. Conversely, hearing problems can contribute to language and other learning difficulties.

Aspects Of Language

Understanding and using language we learn as a child ('native language') can be divided into three distinct processes. Receptive language: the input process - how sound is converted into meaningful chunks of nerve signals. Next, processing the sound code to extract meaning. This involves several sub-processes, including analysis of grammar. Finally, expressive language - taking the meaning back out into speech. MindWeavers is particularly interested in receptive language skills, since it is those skills that can probably be most easily trained. However, there is no reason why other skills involved in both processing and expression could not be trained, provided those skills can be identified.

Receptive Language

Speech is composed of sound units called phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest distinct sound units in a given language that may distinguish the meaning of one word from another. For example, in the English language the words 'pin' and 'bin' are distinguished only by the two different phonemes /p/ and /b/ (they are written in this form /phoneme/ to identify them as representing these smallest units of sound rather than the written letter form 'p' and 'b' which does not convey a distinct sound). There are 44 phonemes in British English (English 'Received Pronunciation'), 24 consonants and 20 vowels (42 in American English). It might seem a relatively easy task to put these phonemes together into words. But when you consider the enormous speed at which the tongue has to move to produce the sounds in continuous speech, and the equally fast processing required by the auditory system to hear subtle differences between speech sounds, it seems a miracle that language happens at all. Just to make matters more complicated, in real speech the pronunciation of one phoneme is strongly influenced by the phonemes around it. For example, the pronunciation of the /b/ and /d/ in 'bad' and 'bed' is influenced by the intervening vowel. In addition, if we analyse a continuous stream of speech, we find that separate words often blend into each other. These factors contribute greatly to making automated speech identification so difficult.

The ability to discriminate between these sounds is a very strong predictor of language success. MindWeavers has proved that improving the ability to discriminate between these sounds can result in significant improvements in language skills. Inability to discriminate between these sounds can result in language and other learning difficulties.

Language Difficulties

Some people, like computers, find it difficult to recognise speech. Language based learning impairments (LLIs) typically have several different contributory factors. But it is quite common for speech perception difficulties to be one part of the problem. One difficulty that is widespread is perceiving and categorising the same phoneme in different contexts. However, recent evidence suggests that the problem may often go deeper than this, to hearing distinctions between the simple sounds that make up phonemes and every other type of sound we hear. It follows from this that training to improve the discrimination between sounds should lead to better speech perception and then to better language. It may be important that this is done in the context of the listeners own language, since very basic training of this sort is known to be rather task specific - that is, the learning does not transfer readily to very different contexts. So training to listen to subtle distinctions between real language sounds may be more effective than training to listen to tones, for example.

Learning Additional Languages

Speech is understood as a result of the brain processing and recognising word sounds through a 'cognitive filter'. This filter responds primarily to the native language for which it has developed. Phonemes can change from one language to another, making it more difficult for non-native speakers to understand and be understood by native speakers. This problem, documented in scientific research, can be a major barrier to acquisition of additional languages. Auditory training, using speech sounds, is a demonstrated way to improve the ability to hear speech sounds in a non-native language.