Interesting links and articles
In case any of you are keen to geek out like I do, here are a few interesting things you can check out on how this all works. It’s all very fascinating stuff, some of which I mention in the video.
I'm not making this stuff up my friends! It's super cool. There's a reason I said not to skip today. If we want to get our accents to sound natural, we have to understand a bit about the brain and language.
Take a look if it’s your thing, if not, absolutely no worries! My method of working with accents is constantly developing, as I read and learn more. Sometimes I read something and then develop an exercise/way of explaining or changing through experimentation. Other times I follow my gut and wing it, see if it gets results, and then investigate to discover why or why not. You’ll do some strange things throughout the month, but rest assured, they may look/seem ridiculous, but there’s a reason they work.
These are the kinds of things I read, just to give you some idea.
On how our brains predict what we’re going to hear:
From https://neurosciencenews.com/word-anticipation-9884/
“This work describes for the first time that the complex machinery of the brain is able to estimate even what specific words it will hear before they are spoken.
The main target was to check how the auditory system acts in the phenomenon of prediction. Thus, the brain can estimate when a word is going to start, which phonemes (sounds) will be the first ones to be heard and pre-activate the auditory system to actively anticipate the stimulus that will impact the ear.
This is more than clear evidence that the auditory regions do not passively respond to the stimulus that impacts on our ear, but actually predict something in advance,” Molinaro adds.”
On mirror neurons, and how they affect language, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron#Language
“A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another.[1][2][3] Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in human[citation needed] and primate species,[4] and birds.
“In humans, functional MRI studies have reported finding areas homologous to the monkey mirror neuron system in the inferior frontal cortex, close to Broca's area, one of the language regions of the brain. This has led to suggestions that human language evolved from a gesture performance/understanding system implemented in mirror neurons. Mirror neurons have been said to have the potential to provide a mechanism for action-understanding, imitation-learning, and the simulation of other people's behaviour. Rates of vocabulary expansion link to the ability of children to vocally mirror non-words and so to acquire the new word pronunciations. Such speech repetition occurs automatically, fast[74] and separately in the brain to speech perception.[75][76] Moreover, such vocal imitation can occur without comprehension such as in speech shadowing[77] and echolalia.”
On how speech develops in babies:
https://kids..org/article/10.3389/frym.2014.00014
“It is interesting to think that a baby has already taken the first steps in terms of language development even before birth [1]. This sounds impossible when we know that language needs to be learnt and does not happen automatically, unlike breathing or sleeping. But babies are actually born knowing the sound and melody of their mother tongue – and they can already “speak” by following the melodic pattern of the language. Of course, this “speaking” does not involve words, and the sound made by newborn babies is often that of crying. But this crying follows a certain melody. You might think that all babies sound similar when they cry, but when a group of German and French scientists investigated the crying sounds of German and French newborn babies [2], they actually discovered that they were different! As you can see in Figure 1, French babies show a cry melody with low intensity at the beginning, which then rises. German babies, on the other hand, show a cry melody with high intensity at the beginning, which then falls. These findings become even more interesting when you know that these cry melodies resemble the melodies of the two languages when people speak French or German: German is, like English, a language that stresses words at the beginning, while French stresses words toward their endings. To give an example, the German word for daddy is “papa” with a stress on the first syllable: papa. The French word for daddy is “papa” with a stress on the last syllable: papa. The surprising thing is that the cry melodies of French and German newborn babies follow these speech stress patterns.”
More about when we do what when it comes to speech. Did you know vowels came first, and that we all start with the same ones?