Why the Sounds of English are Like Keys on the Piano.

 

These neural clusters are like keys on a piano. There are very specific and you will have neurons that are “ba” neurons in “pa” neurons in “da” neurons in “ka”, just like in a piano when you touch a key it going to give you one note.

And because of that, that then allows the brain to perceive speech easily and once a child can perceive speech easily and if you have all had the experience of learning a second language after you were in school, in my case it was French. You remember one of the hardest things to do would be to take a dictation to hear what the teacher is saying and actually perceive it and then write it down. Because it sounds a little muddy at first, so if you are able to tune the brain for the sounds of the language, and if you can really build up that map that makes speech perception easier and it makes learning by listening easier.

 

Clusters are Like Keys to a Piano

Students are going to be much able to sit in a classroom to hear the teacher talk and be able to process the information. Once again if any of you have taken a foreign language you know, especially in high school, you know you want to see it. That is what you want to do, but young children can’t see it. So, we want to build up this capacity to perceive the sounds easily and rapidly and re-tune the brain. 

We have talked about how prevalent the Hispanic population is and so the ELO population. If you just do a comparison of English sounds to Spanish sounds, you will see they are a lot of English sounds that just don’t exist in Spanish. Like the “th” sound in the word “the” or the “z” in the word “zip” or the word “zh” in the word “pleasure”.

Those sounds don’t even exist, so one of the things we want to do is make sure that the brain can process those sounds specifically. And then we have other sounds, English phonemes that are similar but a little bit different, so those of you who know Spanish know that the “r” tends to be “r” in Spanish as opposed to “r” that very, we call it the power little sound in the English language. And then some of our sounds overlap, So building up this ability to perceive all of the speech sound and to perceive them easily and to have the brain finally tuned, then its building the brain from the bottom up just like an infant would build the brain from the bottom up, to learn a language in the first place.