How do I get my Japanese students to pronounce English correctly?!
Two studies jointly worked on by Iverson and Valerie Hazan, PhD, UCL’s department of phonetics and linguistics, have examined whether it is possible to retune how the brain processes speech sounds, and hope that their findings will help make language learning easier for adults. In one study, Japanese subjects were retrained to hear the difference between r’s and l’s (something that Japanese students of English tend to find particularly difficult). The study tested 63 native Japanese subjects in Japan and London, and had them complete a 10-session training course. Before and after training, the subjects were given a number of perceptual tests to evaluate their perception of acoustic cues. Similar tests were carried out in London on Sinhalese (from Sri Lanka) and German speakers who had lived in the United Kingdom for more than 20 years. In the Japanese training study, the subjects improved their recognition of r’s and l’s by an average of 18 percent. So, for example, if an individual co
