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Yay for Adult Learning: Bonds that Bind

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Yay for Adult Learning

Bonds that Bind

Article 16

How are Child Learning and Adult Learning Different –That is the question.

Child learning, especially visual learning and speaking a language, is more efficient in children than adults. Neuroimaging study found rapid neurotransmitter GABA boosting as a major potential explanation-component for that.  1, 2, 3. 4

A second reason for the faster learning is that children’s brains contain more “silent synapses”  which are inactive until required. This neuroplasticity allows for the flexibility in which the brain can acquire new learning  and memory as it is needed. 4.  Notably, plasticity or the ability to learn a motor skill by activating synapses is intensified during intense motor learning. 4

What about neuroplasticity in adults? Recent study of adult mice at MIT in 2022 uncovered that “silent synapses” are abundant in adult mice.  Silent synapses are groundwork for brain capacity and are recruited for new learning.  5, 6, 7

Critically, the human condition of adulthood is different than childhood or adolescence.   By the time a human is an adult, say 18 years old, an individual has considerable experience of being a part of social groups. Bonding is a characteristic shared by humans and other social animals.  (For the other eight characteristics shared by humans and other social animals, such as dolphins, whales, and especially big apes,  see blog article 15 http://www.cleartalkmastery.com/blog/2023/08/23/the-human-factor/)

Bonding theory maintains that most humans most of the time have behavioral patterns because they are bonded to the conventional wisdom of society through their being a member of various groups. 8, 9 and Footnote 1

( Stay with me. These behavioral patterns for most people most of the time positively affect adult learning – making for efficient and durable learning.  Yay for adult learning!)

Familial, education, workplace, religious/church act as drivers through which the bonding to the society’s group rules – behavior patterns encouraged by the groups –are maintained.   As long as ties to home or school or workplace or church remain strong, an individual is likely to maintain or keep doing the behavior patterns encouraged by the groups.

Hirschi (1979) and Johnson et al (1981) in expansion and refinement of  earlier work of Nye describe four processes through which behavior patterns are encouraged and maintained.  The first is commitment — the degree to which a person has interests (school, work, familial aspirations, belief system) that a path with particular behavioral patterns are encouraged and where nonconformity to those patterns would jeopardize that path.   With respect to this conforming or continuing of behavioral patterns, to paraphrase Hirschi, 1969, p 29, the human invests time, energy, the “self” in an activity path – say getting an education, building a business or a career, acquiring a reputation for virtue.  When ndividuals consider rebelling against the behaviors encouraged by the group or activity path, they must consider the costs or the risks they take in losing the investment or commitment they have made.  8, 9, 10. 11

No matter how strongly the groups an individual belongs to encourage specific behaviors and agreement with conventional wisdom, the message will be wasted unless persons have some inducement or reason to listen. The investment, or stake, is such an inducement.   It may include not only an immediate desirable position but a realistic promise of status in the near future.   For example, a student in college has the status of college student; in the workplace, the employee may have the position and status of assistant manager.  An example of the realistic promise of status in the near future could be for the student in college to become a college graduate with a degree (status by itself and enables entry into careers). An example of realistic promise of status in the future within a workplace could be for the assistant manager to see the career path of promotion to manager and above, which carries more status and salary.  Higher aspirations (for education/school such as BA, MA or PhD degrees, or workplace upward trajectory to management) promote the behavior patterns provided that the realistic promises are perceived as attainable over a relatively short time.

A second process of bonding is attachment to other people.  Here, to adhere to the behavior patterns is to act according to the wishes and expectations of others. A high level of attachment makes violation of those behavior patterns of going along with the wishes and expectations of others much less likely.

A third process of bonding is involvement, or engagement in conventional activities; it refers to an individual’s ongoing allocation of time and energy as opposed to one’s past investment of personal resources.  Only certain time and energy allocations that are bound up directly with conventional ties to one’s social group act to preserve or enlarge those behavioral patterns.  For instance, the amount of time watching television or streaming or gaming or reading magazines at home or work does not contribute to strengthening the ties to the family or workplace.  However, the amount of time sharing or preparing meals at home, engaging in family activities including celebrations or at school the amount of time attending class and doing homework, or at the workplace, cooperating with others on projects or engaging in training to increase workplace skill do contribute to involvement and thus strengthen the bonds to those social groups.

The fourth bonding process is belief in the validity or moral validity of social rules of groups or society (Hirschi, 1969, pp 16-26; Johnson et al, 1981).  Examples of belief for humans within the entities they have ties to include these:

1. Familial –Belief that wellbeing of the family is paramount – well-being such as health (all aspects), pursuit of happiness, productivity, safety and security.

2.  Education – Belief that persistence and dedication will yield learning and skill acquisition needed for academic coursework and attainment of graduation (diploma, certification, degree).  Belief that acquisition of skills in the education setting will generate life skills and employment with probable increased levels of status/pay.

3. Workplace – Belief that personal characteristics and behaviors regarding quality and quantity of work or productivity, increasing skills, accountability, focused effort, cooperation, and shared purpose will contribute to attainable desired outcomes for individuals.  These can include well-being on the job and foreseeable possible increase in responsibility, skill attainment, status, and enumeration or pay.

4. Religious entities, churches, or secular groups with codes of ethics:  Belief that the conventional wisdom of the entity for encouraged behaviors will bring enhanced well-being of the individual, of the group, of the society.  Code of ethics or encouraged behaviors could include character traits of honesty, accountability, altruism, sincerity, work ethic, etc.

To paraphrase Johnson et al (1981), to be effective the four processes of bonding – commitment, attachment, involvement and belief—must operate through affiliations with group and organizational representations of conventional wisdom and advice of society.  The stronger the ties, the greater the control or bonding.  The closeness of a tie or an affiliation in any one sector is likely to fluctuate or move up and down, but most adults have a multiplicity of important  conventional ties.  During periods when there is no stake worth protecting in the workplace, then family and other community memberships remain as sources of bonds and control.  For most adults it is an extremely rare occurrence when all important affiliations or ties to groups are in a disintegrated or failed state at once.

This is not true for children or youth/adolescents, who typically have their eggs in far fewer baskets than adults.  The only important conventional affiliations for most young persons are school and family.  When these ties deteriorate, there is nothing left because there are not affiliations with other groups. 

According to bonding theory, employment that creates an affiliation that the young or older adult worker does not want to jeopardize through misconduct is more likely to be effective in promoting the behavior patterns espoused or encouraged by the employment entity than employment that merely offers involvement in a conventional pursuit. For example,  an individual who feels motivated by the goals and mission of the workplace is more likely to devote more effort and focus than the individual whose work life is limited to just showing up at work, doing assigned tasks and taking home a paycheck. If the employment or school entity provides a commitment stake accompanied by valued attachments to other people, so much the stronger is the tie.

So, where is the advantage of adults compared to children learning a new skill?  Bonding theory maintains that the ties to various social groups give the adult the advantage of behavior patterns in the form of habits and desires which makes learning a new skill more efficient and enduring.   For example, acquiring a new skill, such as clear American English compared to an already present accented-English or hard-to-understand-English, requires heightened attention or focus/concentration,  deliberate (not mindless) practice, which is spaced in time or schedule (or distributed practice/perseverence in practice) to make for long lasting learning.  Adults have had extended school experience – 12 or more years of school learning is vastly different than 2 or 9 years.  The extended years of school learning for adults in the 21st century also means experience with video and auditory lessons, doing homework, and likely virtual meetings or learning.

Children may not have developed consolidated interests, ethics, interest in purpose and meaningful activities, knowledge about real world requirements and demands and priorities.   Contrarily, these mind frames are present for most adults, most of the time. Yay for adults!

Next, bonding and bootstrapping new skills onto old—the how for fast, durable adult learning.

FOOTNOTE 1This description of Bonding Theory is an expression of the Hirschi Social Bond Theory from 1969 which was based on his work in the 1960s and described and refined by Johnson et al, 1981. Bonding Theory as elucidated by Hirschi Johnson is a social control theory which describes the essential processes of why most people most of the time adhere to conventional behaviors rather than behaviors defined as criminal.  Notably, Bonding Theory here in this Article 16 is an expansion to include those same four processes  which form the basis for “why most people most of the time adhere to conventional patterns of behavior”.   While Hirschi limited his description to conventional behavior in contrast to behaviors defined by the society to be against the law, our description and examples extend more broadly.  Relatedly and notably, the four processes of Bonding Theory was and has been the well-spring from which qualitative assessment and program decisions were anchored from the start of this author’s work beginning 2000 for instruction to maximize efficiency and durability of nonnative-born adult acquisition of clear American English speech.

References:

  1. Sebastian M.; Becker, Markus; Qi, Andrea; Geiger, Patrician’ Frank, Utrika Il; Rosendahl, Luke A.; Malloni, Wilhelm M.; Sasaki, Yuka; Greenlee, Mark W.; Watanabe, Takeo (5 December 2022)  “Efficient learning in children with rapid GABA boosting during and after training”. Current Biology. 32(23) 5022-5030)
  2. “Brain scans shed light on how kids learn faster than adults”. UPI
  3. Buxton, Alex (10 February 2016).  “What Happens in the Brain When Children Learn?” Neuroscience News
  4. Ismail, Fatima Yousif; Tatemi, Ali; Johnston, Michael V. (1 January 2017).  “Cerebral plasticity: Windows of Opportunity in the developing  brain”. European Journal of Paediatric Neurology. 21 (2); 23-48.
  5.  University press release: Trafton, Anne.  “Silent synapses are abundant in the adult brain”. Massachusetts Institute of Technology via medicalexpress.com.  Retrieved Dec. 2022.
  6. Vardalaki, Dimitra; Chung, Kwanghun; Harnett, Mark T. (December 2022). Filopodia are a structural substrate for silent synapses in adult neocortex”. Nature 612 (7939): 323-327.
  7.  Lioreda, Claudia Lopez (16 December 2022)  “Adult mouse brains are teeming with silent synapses”.  Science News..
  8. Johnson, Grant; Bird, Tom; Warren-Little, Judith; Beville, Sylvia L. (1981). Delinquency Prevention: Theories and Strategies, Second Edition, Center for Action Research publ. U.S. Dept of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention: 2.1-2.71.
  9. Hirschi, Travis, “Causes of Delinquency”. Berkeley: University of California Press, cited in Johnson, G. et al (1981). Delinquency Prevention: Theories and Strategies, Center for Action Research. U.S. Dept of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
  10. Nye, F.   Ivan (1958).  “Family Relationships and Delinquent Behavior”. New York:  John Wiley and Sons, Inc cited in Johnson, G. et al (1981). Delinquency Prevention: Theories and Strategies, Center for Action Research. U.S. Dept of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
  11. Costello, Barbara J., (2012). Theories of Crime, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Oxford Handbooks, p 131-142

Copyright 2023 by Clear Talk Mastery Inc and Antonia L. Johnson

The Human Factor

The Human Factor – Article 15

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We– Humans

According to Michael Shermer 2004, the following characteristics  are shared by humans and other social animals, such as primates, dolphins, whales, especially the great apes:

  1. attachment and bonding,
  2. cooperation and mutual aid,
  3. sympathy and empathy,
  4. direct and indirect reciprocity,
  5. altruism and reciprocal altruism,
  6. conflict resolution and peacemaking,
  7. deception and deception detection,
  8. community concern and caring about what others think about you,
  9. awareness of and response to the social rules of the group.  (1)

     Interesting, don’t you think?  I’m still pondering on this information weeks after reading this finding by ethologists, scientists who study animal behavior.

    Funny, the vanity of human beings.  We pretty much think those nine characteristics are unique to humans.  It took study, ethology, of other social animals to discover these characteristics in other animals.  Importantly, the scale for these characteristics in humans far outstrips anything found in other social animals.

Only Humans Send the Children to School

      In the United States, the law requires all children to go to school. In U.S. public schools, schooling usually begins between 4 and 6 and continues to around age 17 to 18. After the first year of kindergarten, there are 12 grades.  (2)

     In North American society, English speaking and written English skills are specifically taught to children for twelve years.  Such a lot of time and effort for acquiring English speech and written communication!   So the question is: Why bother?

     Likely because humans are social animals and have those same those nine characteristics listed before as other social animals.  But unlike other social animals, humans use oral communication or speech, and written language as primary vehicles to express and communicate those characteristics of social animals.

The Critical Reasons for those Nine Characteristics of Social Animals

     Why those nine characteristics?  Social science and ethology of social animals agree that to coexist in groups, those characteristics in individuals greatly contribute to survival and thriving of the group.

     How important is survival and thriving?   According to Dalrymple (2001), Earth is 4.5 billion years old (a billion is 100 million). (3)  Life (the Last Universal Ancestor, LUCA with the genes common to all life today) may be 3.5 billion years old  (Theobold et al, 2010’ Schopf, 2007).  (4) (5).

     Since the beginning of life on Earth, 99% of all species are extinct—that’s 5 billion species. Current visible species range from 10 million to 14 million of which about 1.9 million have been named and 1.6 million documented in a central data base to date, leaving 80% not yet described. (6)

     Heck, 10 to 14 million species sound like a lot of species’ survival.  But not so much when compared to the 99% extinction of visible species on Earth, those 5 billion species.

Next:   The Critical Role of Bonding for Humans– and What the Heck That Has to do with Acquiring Clear English Speech!

References

  • Shermer, Michael, 2004, The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule  – a book on ethics and evolutionary psychology, Henry Holt and Company
  •  https://usahello.org/education/children/grade-levels/
  • Dalrymple, G. Brent (2001). “The age of the Earth in the twentieth century: a problem (mostly solved”. Special Publications, Geological Society of London. 190 (1): 205-221
  •  Theobald, D. L. (May 2010). “A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry”. Nature465 (7295): 219–222.
  • Schopf, J. William; Kurdryavtsev, Anatolliy B.; Czaja, Andrew D.; Tripathi, Abhishek B. (5 October 2007). “Evidence of Archean life: Stromatolites and microfossils”.   Precambrian Research.  158 (3-4): 141-155.
  • Stearns, Beverly Peterson; Sterns, S. C.: Stephen C. (200) Watching from the Edge of Extinction.  Yale University Press. p. preface x.

Copyright 2023 Clear Talk Mastery, Inc

Word Memory- What You Don’t Know!

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Get Ahead of the Curve

Speed Up Learning

Article 14

Saying Words Out Loud

       Robust evidence indicates that saying a word out loud makes it more memorable than simply reading it silently or hearing someone else say it.   This memory benefit of “hearing oneself” (and producing the word) is referred to as the production effect.  The results of studies indicate that oral production is beneficial because it involves two different componentsspeaking (a motor act) and hearing oneself (the self-referential auditory input).  (1)  (2) (3)

Amazing Effect of Accurate Reading Aloud on Accurate English Pronunciation

       Speech intelligibility increases dramatically when native-born English speaking children learn to read and spend more time reading.  Five-to-six-year-old English learners have vocabularies of 2,500 to 5,000 words and add 5,000 words per year for the first several years of schooling.  (4) (5)

        For adult nonnative-born individuals who want acquisition of clear English pronunciation, reading aloud accurately words, phrases and sentences is an ideal vehicle for increasing accuracy of pronunciation for helping to make accurate pronunciation habitual.  

       It is in reading words that English communicators learn, for example, that there are different meanings for “hit” and “hid” or  “hot” and hat”  or “bottle” and “battle”  or  “virus” and “various” or “kind” and “kin”. Or the embarrassing pronunciation mistakes of  “focus” and “f*ck us,” or “beach” and “b*tch”.

Amazing Effect of Accurate Reading Aloud on Comprehension of English Words and Sentences

         Just as the comprehension of English words increases exponentially when native-born children learn to read and spend more time reading,  nonnative-born persons who increase the intelligibility or accurate pronunciation of English words report that their understanding of spoken English also greatly improves.   Likely, the oral production which is a motor act and involves the component of the brain for oral speaking  generates memory and recognition growth for hearing and processing English speech. (1) (2).

        An example involves a south Korean-born person who had been working on her Ph D for philosophy in the United States for about three years when she first started working with us.  She came to her coaching during her Course 2 incredibly happy.  That very week she watched broadcast news report in English and turned off the English subtitles and found that finally she could understand English spoken news report!

                              xxxxxxxx

         Now some information for just about everyone who needs to understand and speak multiple syllable words—for social conversation, current broadcast news vocabulary, and especially work vocabulary.

Learning and Memorizing English Words

     According to research whole-word memorization is “labor-intensive” requiring on average about 35 repetitions or trials per word.  This strategy of 35 repetitions of a word consecutively or in “one sitting” is called massed practice and is excellent for human memory.

     Phonics advocates — who argue that learning decoding rules or patterns substantially affects the efficiency of learning to read accurately, –say  that most words are decodable, so relatively few words have to be memorized. (6)

Typical Inefficient Learning Strategy for ESLers Learning to Speak English

      In our interview with new student-learners for more than 20 years, we ask how they learned to speak English.   Most reported learning by imitating the teacher and memorizing  pronunciation of words.  Rarely were their English teachers native-born English speakers, so the pronunciation was accented English—Chinglish, Spanglish,  German accented,  Arabic accented, etc.  Nowadays, more ESL students are reporting that they also used audio recorded lessons where imitation, of course, is the name of the game.

Irregular  English Words – Optimal Learning Strategy

      Notably, irregular words which do not follow the typical four syllable rules or types for written words  present a substantial challenge.   Research in 2018 concluded that “fully-alphabetical students”  learn irregular words more easily when  they use a process called hierarchical decoding.  (8)  “Fully-alphabetical students” are those who are fluent in the pronunciation of the 25 English consonants and 14 vowel sounds.   Hierarchical decoding means to focus attention on the irregular elements such as a vowel-digraph where there is a silent e such as break (b-r-ea-k) or great (g-r-ea-t) where the “e” is silent, or  height (h-eigh-t) where the “e” and “gh” are silent).   In essence, teachers and tutors should teach decoding with more advanced vowel patterns before expecting English communication learners, including young native-born readers to tackle irregular verbs.   These words requiring hierarchical decoding are also called “word families.”

Question- Why Didn’t My English Teachers Teach Me These Rules or Approaches to Decoding English Written Words?

      The simple answer is that they didn’t know the rules or approaches.

Take Home Messages?

     What are the take-home messages for this article?

     First, accurate reading with your voice of words, phrases and sentences are excellent routes to increasing the accuracy of spoken American English (using  deliberate practice and distributed or spaced schedule of practice).

      Second, remember from the preceding blog article that reading (similar to speaking  from your brain and not accompanying reading written words) involves more than six separate areas of the brain which must be coordinated together.

      Third, memorizing the pronunciation of words (it takes about 35 repetitions for each word) is called massed practice.  Consecutively and accurately repeating with your voice an important and difficult word is an excellent use for massed practice mode of learning.  But to get those words into long-term memory requires distributed or spaced schedule of learning.

       However massed practice of 35 repetitions is a downright impossible task for the vocabulary needed for fluent English (30,000 to 65,000 words average vocabulary for native-born English speaking adults).    This gets to the obvious need for using better strategies for learning accurate English pronunciation  (aiming for fluency, perhaps, of 30,000 to 65,000 vocabulary words for fluent English).

     Use these better strategies or approaches —-

      Systematically, learn the rules for pronunciation for English words, also called phonics approaches.  Begin with  learning the letter to speech sound relations. (9)

       Then add English pronunciation for English syllable types  of open syllables, digraph syllables, silent e syllables and closed syllables.

       Then learn the most frequently accurate 8 rules for dividing written multiple syllable words into syllables.  Recall that professional words are usually multiple syllable.  Once these rules for the four syllable word types and 8 most frequent rules for dividing English words into syllables  are fully integrated in your memory (you are  a fully “alphabetized learner”), then  systematically learn hierarchical decoding for irregular English words.

       The key? Structuring the learning

  What you just got is a super quick summary of our research and development for more than 20 years at Clear Talk Mastery.

P.S.  Why so many irregular words?  Because English is a polyglot language which means it has borrowed words from many languages.  The first immigrants into the British Isle brought proto-German with them, then Norse came with the Vikings from Scandinavia, followed by Norman conquest of the British Isle and many French words.  With the explosion of science knowledge,

Footnotes for blog

  • Colin M MacLeod (December 18, 2011). “I said, you said: the production effect gets personal.”Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 18 (6): 1197–1202
  •  William R. Klemm (December 15, 2017). “Enhance Memory with the “Production Effect”. Psychology today”.     
  • “Study finds reading information aloud to yourself improves memory. University of Waterloo”.. December 1, 2017.    
  • Hustad, K.C. et al Speech Development Between 30 and 119 Months in Typical Children I: Intelligibility Growth Curves for Single-Word and Multiword Productions,  Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, Oct. 4, 2021.
  • “Inference, says Clare Sealy, isn’t a skill that can be taught.  But it can be improved-through knowledge.  ResearchED.. 24 June 2019.
  • Murray, Bruce; McIlwain, Jane (2019). “How do beginners learn to read irregular words as sight words”. Journal of Research in Reading. 42 (1): 123–136.
  • “Orthographic mapping. Reading rockets”.. 19 September 2019.
  • Murray, B., et al, How Do Beginners Learn to Read Irregular Words as Sight Words,  Journal of Research in Reading , July 4, 2018
  • Linnea C. Ehri (2014) Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary, Scientific Studies of Reading,  18L1,5-21, D01 in “Orthographic mapping. Reading rockets”.. 19 September 2019

Copyright 2023 Clear Talk Mastery, Inc

Amazing Effect of Vocal Reading on Pronunciation

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Did You Know?

      Writing is only about 5,500 years old, unlike human speech estimated to be from 50,000 years to 2 million years old.  In contrast to speech, the human brain did not naturally evolve to read.  Thus, the brain adapts to the challenge of reading.

       The Amazing Effect of Accurate Vocal Reading on Accurate English Pronunciation Article 13

     English speech intelligibility increases sharply for North American children when they learn to read.  For adult nonnative-born individuals who want acquisition of clear English, reading words, phrases and sentences is an ideal vehicle for helping to learn accurate English pronunciation.

      It is in reading words that the speakers learns that there are different meanings for “hit” and “hid,” or “hot” and “hat,” “bottle” and “battle,”  “kin” and kind,”  “beach” and “b*tch” which rhymes with “witch”.

       And in oral reading or reading with your voice, the human being learns that the spelling of the English word most frequently corresponds to the accurate pronunciation.

       The process of reading involves most of the brain, especially an interconnection between visual areas and language areas.  And importantly reading also involves neural systems related to action, emotion, decision making and memory.

        Big alert!  The sensorimotor cortex of the brain is the most active region of the brain during reading.  A seminal MRI study in 2014 involving adults and children, where bodily movement was restricted, demonstrated strong evidence revealing that this region may be correlated with automatic word processing and decoding.  Specifically, this area of the brain was highly active in persons new to the English language, as well as those children learning to read, and those children struggling to read (dyslexia). 

                                            Brain Regions Used for Reading?

      Here is the description from Wikipedia (Reading):

      The occipital and parietal lobes are involved for orthographic processing of visual words

       The two major regions of the brain associated with phonological skills (speech sounds) are the temporal-parietal region and the Perisylvian Region (in  MRI study, 2001).

     The Perisylvian Region, which is the region of the brain believed to connect Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, is another region highly active during phonological activities when participants are asked to verbalize known and unknown words.

     The inferior frontal region is active in several reading related activities associated with comprehension and processing skills such as spelling and working memory.

     In addition to regions on the cortex considered gray matter on MRIs, several white matter fasciculus are active during different reading activities.  These three white matter regions connect the three respected cortex regions as the brain reads thus these regions are responsible for the brain’s cross-model integration involved in reading.  These are the left arcuate faciculus, the left inferior longitudinal faciculus, and the superior longitudinal fasciculus.

      The cerebellum, which is not part of the cerebral cortex, is also believed to play an important role in reading.  The role of  automatization, word accuracy, and reading speed is associated with the cerebellum.

        Have you wondered why learning to speak clear English feels so hard?   A principal reason is that your brain is working hard to access and coordinate a good number of separate brain regions!

Article 13, Blog, copyright 2023 Clear Talk Mastery, Inc

B and CH for “Beach” For Fast and Easy Learning Using Human Brain Info

B and CH for “Beach” For Fast and Easy Learning Using Human Brain Info

This is Number 5 in our series of recommended sequence for fast, easy mastery of American English speech sounds.  The directed instruction is for English consonants B, CH and the word “beach”.

Your brain organizes the production of speech by phonetic feature and by muscle group of the face.

The speech sound for American English B has the phonetic features of being quick and  of having a voice from the vocal folds in your throat and releasing an audible puff of air.  The American English B is pronounced by using the fast twitch muscle fibers of the lips by pressing the lips together and then opening the lips quickly.

For the American English speech sound CH,  the phonetic features are the release of an audible quick puff of air but no voice from the vocal folds in the throat.  The American English CH is pronounced by using the fast twitch muscles fibers of the tip of the tongue by pushing up and pressing the tip of the tongue against the roof or top of the mouth directly behind the top front teeth then bringing the tip of the tongue down quickly.

How do you know if you are doing these accurately in American English?  Answer: if your speech sounds match that of Dr. Antonia Johnson’s production on the video below, you are accurate for American English.  

Information alert:  The pronunciation of those sounds may be different in your first language so pay close attention to the position of the articulators–tongue and lips– the manner which is quick for American English, and the requisite or needed speech sound!