Speaker
Description
The auditory motor cortex is analogous to a piece of origami paper: the more it is folded in particular locations, the more likely that folds will start to develop in those places because the paper becomes stressed with use. When phonemic categories are subject to wide variation in L1 but not L2+, a wider acceptability of phonemic categorisation is likely for L2+ until that phoneme is acquired after a certain number of encounters.
Keywords
listening
phonology
SLA
References
Best, C. T. (1995). A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience. (pp. 171–206). York Press.
Best, C. T., & Tyler, M. D. (2007). Nonnative and second-language speech perception: Commonalities and complementarities. In O.-S. Bohn & M. J. Munro (Eds), Language Experience in Second Language Speech Learning: In honor of James Emil Flege (Vol. 17, pp. 13–34). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.17.07bes
Flege, J., & Bohn, O.-S. (2021). The revised Speech Learning Model. In R. Wayland, (Ed.), Second language speech learning: Theoretical and empirical progress (pp. 3–83). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108886901.002
Flege, J. E. (1995). Second-language Speech Learning: Theory, Findings, and Problems. In W. Strange (Ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience. (pp. 229–273). York Press.
Glanz, O., Derix, J., Kaur, R., Schulze-Bonhage, A., Auer, P., Aertsen, A., & Ball, T. (2018). Real-life speech production and perception have a shared premotor-cortical substrate. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-26801-x
Short summary
The auditory motor cortex is analogous to a piece of origami paper: the more it is folded in particular locations, the more likely that folds will start to develop in those places because the paper becomes stressed with use. When phonemic categories are subject to wide variation in L1 but not L2+, a wider acceptability of phonemic categorisation is likely for L2+ until that phoneme is acquired after a certain number of encounters.
Abstract
The auditory motor cortex can be analogous to a piece of origami paper. The more that piece of origami paper is folded in particular locations, the more likely that folds will start to develop in those places because the paper becomes stressed with use. In other areas less subject to use, the paper does not fold so easily and remains pristine. With the auditory motor cortex, this use principle applies to both perception and production of speech, albeit with some physical limits such as auditory capacity and articulatory limitations such as tongue length and muscular capacity (Glanz et al., 2018). In sum, with greater use of the language, any random decisions made are likely to occur in the areas already used for folding our metaphorical piece of paper. In applying this model to second language acquisition, when phonemic categories in the auditory motor cortex are subject to wide variation in L1 but not L2+, a wider acceptability of phonemic categorisation is likely for L2+ until that phoneme is acquired with its own set of parameters, which occurs only after a certain number of encounters (due to the need to retrieve and assign those parameters). This model is informed by other existing models, particularly the Perceptual Acquisition Model (PAM: Best, 1995; also PAM-L2, Best & Tyler, 2007) and Speech Learning Model (Flege, 1995) and its revision, SLM-r, (Flege & Bohn, 2021).
| Title | The origami model of phonology acquisition: Exposure facilitates pathways |
|---|