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Revolutionary approach to learning langua

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Jar-ptitsa
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 Message 17 of 129
29 January 2009 at 8:55am | IP Logged 
I think that most of (probably all) "revolutionary approach" to language learning is crap: always it's a fashion and methods, with which it's possible learn a language only by listening, only looking to stupid pictures with labels, no grammar, only in 3 months, 7 days, 48 hours or other crap.

In my opinion it's evident you must listen/hear very much, read much, learn the grammar, notice the connections, patterns, understand lexis and the culture differences, receive corrections by native speakers or a good teacher etc.. It's a slow process and revolutionary approaches are absolutely lies for money.

It will be possible learn a language only listening (when you're adult, or not a little child) when it's created a thing for put in your brain with the language, like in the computers. Although, this would not be learning it, because the knowledge is implanted, but the consolidation would be listening it. At the moment, they don't place such things with language infos but the possibilies are to destroy this abilities in the brain (or other ones), but also to stimulate some areas for certain, for example, chemicals. This will occur in about 30 years, approximatley.
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slucido
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 Message 18 of 129
29 January 2009 at 2:14pm | IP Logged 
This article doesn't explain anything new, but it's very interesting.

The practical point of the article is about the importance of pasive listening. Listening your target language, native speakers material, is important from the very beginning, even if you don't pay conscious attention. We are talking about subliminal, implicit and unconscious learning.

If you hear your target language like a background noise, this has a neurological effect and it will be much easier to learn the language. Remember, when we speak about "subliminal" learning, we are talking about SUPRALIMINAL stimulus, but UNCONCIOUS perception. These are good news, because you can use this "trick" doing other tasks, even working in your own native language.

Sure we have neurological mechanisms (neural plasticity) and phenomens like PRIMING and FACILITATION.. Here your have an introduction about priming:

Priming (psychology):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29

If you have interest about this topic, I recommend the Pawel Lewicki's site. It has a lot of references.

Conclusions of the Research on Nonconscious Information Processing
(A quick "non-technical" summary)

http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~pawel-lewicki/simple.html


I think this article about 'subliminal learning" is interesting for us too:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/25190.php

"It's possible that other parts of the brain could work this way too," Watanabe says. "People might be able to improve their pronunciation of a new language, if it's presented simply, without paying attention. It's possible the brain could be changed without a lot of effort."

About the implicit and explicit language learning, here you have a few comments here:

http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic98/finkb/10_98.html# kap05

More research can be found here:

http://reberlab.psych.northwestern.edu/

Skosnik, Mirza, Gitelman, Parrish, Mesulam & Reber (2002)
Neural Correlates of Artificial Grammar Learning
NeuroImage

Reber, P.J., Gitelman, D.R., Parrish, T.B., & Mesulam, M-M. (2005).
Priming and the acquisition of visual expertise: Changes in neural activity beyond the second presentation.
Cerebral Cortex, 15, 787 - 795

Reber, P.J, Gitelman, D.R., Parrish, T.B. & Mesulam, M.-M. (2003).
Dissociating explicit and implicit category knowledge with fMRI.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15, 574-685.

Reber & Squire (1998).
Encapsulation of Implicit and Explicit Memory in Sequence Learning
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

And there is specific research about:

"unconscious learning. conditioning to subliminal visual stimuli"

http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/redalyc/pdf/172/17270102.pdf

Here you have a reference about the active and passive issue regarding subliminal learning and nonconscious conditioning too:

Psychophysics: Is subliminal learning really passive?

Aaron R. Seitz1 & Takeo Watanabe
Nature 422, 36 (6 March 2003) | doi:10.1038/422036a

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v422/n6927/full/422036a .html#top

"Perceptual learning can occur as a result of exposure to a subliminal stimulus, without the subject having to pay attention and without relevance to the particular task in hand1 — but is this type of learning purely passive? Here we show that perceptual learning is not passive, but instead results from reinforcement by an independent task2, 3. As this learning occurred on a subliminal feature, our results are inconsistent with attentional learning theories4, 5 in which learning occurs only on stimuli to which attention is directed. Instead, our findings suggest that the successful recognition of a relevant stimulus can trigger an internal reward6 and give rise to the learning of irrelevant and even subliminal features that are correlated with the occurrence of the reward."


Other references here:

http://lib.bioinfo.pl/meid:55364

Imaging unconscious semantic priming.

Nature. 1998 Oct 8;395 (6702):597-600 9783584 (P,S,E,B)
S Dehaene, L Naccache, G Le Clec'H, E Koechlin, M Mueller, G Dehaene-Lambertz, P F van de Moortele, D Le Bihan
INSERM U.334, Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV, Orsay, France.

"Visual words that are masked and presented so briefly that they cannot be seen may nevertheless facilitate the subsequent processing of related words, a phenomenon called masked priming. It has been debated whether masked primes can activate cognitive processes without gaining access to consciousness. Here we use a combination of behavioural and brain-imaging techniques to estimate the depth of processing of masked numerical primes. Our results indicate that masked stimuli have a measurable influence on electrical and haemodynamic measures of brain activity. When subjects engage in an overt semantic comparison task with a clearly visible target numeral, measures of covert motor activity indicate that they also unconsciously apply the task instructions to an unseen masked numeral. A stream of perceptual, semantic and motor processes can therefore occur without awareness."

Nonconscious associative learning: Pavlovian conditioning of skin conductance responses to masked fear-relevant facial stimuli.

Psychophysiology. 1994 Jul ;31 (4):375-85 10690918 (P,S,E,B)
F Esteves, C Parra, U Dimberg, A Ohman
Department of Clinical Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden.

"We examined the possibility of nonconscious associative learning in a context of skin conductance conditioning, using emotional facial expressions as stimuli. In the first experiment, subjects were conditioned to a backwardly masked angry face that was followed by electric shock, with a masked happy face as the nonreinforced stimulus. In spite of the effectively masked conditioned stimuli, differential conditioned skin conductance responses were observed in a subsequent nonmasked extinction phase. This effect could not be attributed to differential sensitization or pseudo-conditioning. In the second experiment, the differential responding during extinction was replicated with angry but not with happy faces as conditioned stimuli. It was concluded that with fear-relevant facial expressions as the conditioned stimulus, associative learning was possible even in conditions where the subjects remained unaware of the conditioned stimulus and its relationship to the unconditioned stimulus."


Subliminal perception and the levels of activation

Can J Psychiatry. 1981 Jun ;26 (4):255-9 7296439 (P,S,E,B)
F Borgeat, R Chabot, L Chaloult

"The influence of the auditory subliminal messages on the level of activation has been evaluated through a double-blind study. Twenty consenting subjects were alternately submitted to activating and deactivating subliminal messages. Activation changes were estimated through the variations in the scores at the Mood Adjective Check List. Five out of this test's six factors concerned by the content of the subliminal messages responded differently according to the nature of these messages; four factors did so to a statistically significant degree. These results tend to indicate that auditory subliminal perceptions can influence the level of activation. The authors raise several questions, especially stressing that the parameters regulating subliminal response and susceptibility remain largely undefined and in need of systematic investigation."


Subliminal words activate semantic categories (not automated motor responses).

Psychon Bull Rev. 2002 Mar ;9 (1):100-6 12026940 (P,S,E,B)
Richard L Abrams, Mark R Klinger, Anthony G Greenwald
Psychology Department, University of Washington, Seattle 98195-1525, USA. rlabrams@u.washington.edu

"Semantic priming by visually masked, unidentifiable ("subliminal") words occurs robustly when the words appearing as masked primes have been classified earlier in practice as visible targets. It has been argued (Damian, 2001) that practice enables robust subliminal priming by automatizing learned associations between words and the specific motor responses used to classify them. Two experiments demonstrate that, instead, the associations formed in practice that underlie subliminal priming are between words and semantic categories. Visible words classified as pleasant or unpleasant in practice with one set of response key assignments functioned later as subliminal primes with appropriate valence, even when associations of keys with valences were reversed before the test. This result shows that subliminal priming involves unconscious categorization of the prime, rather than just the automatic activation of a practiced stimulus-response mapping."


Contextual cueing: implicit learning and memory of visual context guides spatial attention.

Cognit Psychol. 1998 Jun ;36 (1):28-71 9679076 (P,S,E,B)
M M Chun, Y Jiang
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA. marvin.chun@yale.edu

"Global context plays an important, but poorly understood, role in visual tasks. This study demonstrates that a robust memory for visual context exists to guide spatial attention. Global context was operationalized as the spatial layout of objects in visual search displays. Half of the configurations were repeated across blocks throughout the entire session, and targets appeared within consistent locations in these arrays. Targets appearing in learned configurations were detected more quickly. This newly discovered form of search facilitation is termed contextual cueing. Contextual cueing is driven by incidentally learned associations between spatial configurations (context) and target locations. This benefit was obtained despite chance performance for recognizing the configurations, suggesting that the memory for context was implicit. The results show how implicit learning and memory of visual context can guide spatial attention towards task-relevant aspects of a scene."


Awareness modifies the skill-learning benefits of sleep.

Curr Biol. 2004 Feb 3;14 (3):208-12 14761652 (P,S,E,B)
Edwin M Robertson, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Daniel Z Press
Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation, Behavioral Neurology Unit, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 330 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02215 USA.

"Behind every skilled movement lies months of practice. However, practice alone is not responsible for the acquisition of all skill; performance can improve between, not just within, practice sessions. An important principle shaping these offline improvements may be an individual's awareness of learning a new skill. New skills, such as a sequence of finger movements, can be learned unintentionally (with little awareness for the sequence, implicit learning) or intentionally (explicit learning). We measured skill in an implicit and explicit sequence-learning task before and after a 12 hr interval. This interval either did (8 p.m. to 8 a.m.) or did not (8 a.m. to 8 p.m.) include a period of sleep. Following explicit sequence learning, offline skill improvements were only observed when the 12 hr interval included sleep. This overnight improvement was correlated with the amount of NREM sleep. The same improvement could also be observed in the evening (with an interval from 8 p.m. to 8 p.m.), so it was not coupled to retesting at a particular time of day and cannot therefore be attributed to circadian factors. In contrast, in the implicit learning task, offline learning was observed regardless of whether the 12 hr interval did or did not contain a period of sleep. However, these improvements were not observed with only a 15 min interval between sessions. Therefore, the practice available within each session cannot account for these skill improvements. Instead, sufficient time is necessary for offline learning to occur. These results show a behavioral dissociation, based upon an individual's awareness for having learned a sequence of finger movements. Offline learning is sleep dependent for explicit skills but time dependent for implicit skills."



Some people have problems about terminology: subliminal, implicit and unconscious. Here you have a few explanations about this terminology.


Subliminal perception and its cognates: theory, indeterminacy, and time.

Erdelyi MH.
Brooklyn College and the Graduate School, CUNY, Brooklyn, NY 11210, USA.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14990242

"Unconscious processes, by whatever name they may be known (e.g., "subliminal," "implicit"), are invariably operationalized by the dissociation paradigm, any situation involving the dissociation between two indicators (or sets of indicators)...."

Implicit Learning

Carol Augart Seger, a,
Department of Psychology, Franz Hall, 405 Hilgard Avenue, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90024, USA

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W Y5-46SGJVW-X&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F31%2F1994&_alid=706779 716&_rdoc=15&_fmt=summary&_orig=mlkt&_cdi=7177&_sort=v&_st=1 7&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=2179&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_u rlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=5f02ea0815c29cb71040e8c5e9a00415

"Implicit learning is nonepisodic learning of complex information in an incidental manner, without awareness of what has been learned.. Implicit learning experiments use 3 different stimulus structures (visual, sequence, and function) and 3 different dependent measures or response modalities (conceptual fluency, efficiency, and prediction and control). Implicit learning may require a certain minimal amount of attention and may depend on attentional and working memory mechanisms. The result of implicit learning is implicit knowledge in the form of abstract (but possibly instantiated) representations rather than verbatim or aggregate representations. Implicit learning shows biases and dissociations in learning different stimulus structures. The dependence of implicit learning on particular brain areas is discussed, some conclusions are drawn for modeling implicit learning, and the interaction of implicit and explicit learning is considered."




Edited by slucido on 29 January 2009 at 2:41pm

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chelovek
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 Message 19 of 129
29 January 2009 at 3:14pm | IP Logged 
Cainntear wrote:
First up, the article was written by the university the guy did his PhD at -- though not a prime source, it is far closer to it than the usual junk science in the mainstream press.

Secondly, Sulzberger makes some pretty astonishing claims: "To learn a language you have to grow the appropriate brain tissue"; "Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language—which is how babies learn their first language."

Now I'm no neuroscientist, but even I know that current academic thought is that the adult brain doesn't "grow", it merely reconfigures the existing tissues. A child's brain grows new connections, an adult brain learns by altering the strength of fixed connections and doing some funky stuff with dendrites (that they're only just discovering now).

That he can claim a model that is so out-of-step with mainstream neuroscience casts doubt on his academic credibility.

And as for "clear that the actual researcher has only concluded that listening is critical", while he does indeed use the word critical, he did also say that "One hour a day of studying French text in a classroom is not enough—but an extra hour listening to it on the iPod would make a huge difference," which is about as unclear as it gets. We have the apparent fixed variable of time spent (1 hour) and no explicit notion of splitting that time between activities -- he appears to advocate a 100% switch from classroom study to listening.

If the message is confused, it's the messenger's fault, not the listener's.
Don't blame the kiwi (no chance I'm writing out that username!)

Now, addressing several points from the article:

Is this exposure critical? Did I get this exposure? I don't know. Most of my exposure to incomprehensible Gaelic and Spanish was while I watched TV/films with subtitles. Studies into interactions and interference of sensory input to the brain suggest that the act of reading the subtitles actually dulls auditory perception as it filters out the "noise" that distracts the reading process (and because reading activates the "hearing" parts of the brain).

So I was certainly in an environment with a lot of native sound, but there is academic disagreement as to whether I ever really heard any of it or not.

"Our ability to learn new words is directly related to how often we have been exposed to the particular combinations of the sounds which make up the words."
This is an extreme standpoint.

I certainly certainly believe it is true that:
Our ability to learn new words is directly related to how familiar we are with the particular combinations of the sounds which make up the words.

To make the leap between the two statements, his study must prove that listening to untuned input is more effective than a phonetically structured instructional course, but given the sore underrepresentation of phonetics in modern teaching, I find it unlikely that he did so.

What do I mean by this?
I mean that most courses let the content be dictated by a grammatical ordering or particular subject based language. New sounds appear as and when this ordering demands. This means a new phoneme can be included in one word and one word only for half-a-dozen lessons, and new words are also learned with other new sounds before that first phoneme is encountered in another word.

It may well be that this is the crucial defficiency in most materials: the lack of distinct examples prevents the formation of a meaningful, independent neural representation of the new phoneme.

Of course, without seeing his paper (rather than the university's self-congratulatory puff-piece) I can't say for sure that he hasn't explored this -- but it is extremely unlikely that he has....


Anyway -- this is just a PhD thesis, not the work of some top prof....


Yeah, I guess a layman is definitely qualified to talk about what it is "extremely unlikely" that a scientist did or did not do in his research. Talk about arrogance.

The researcher is not quoted as saying "listening is the best method". The article-writer said that, and article writers are not part of the research team. Period. The actual quotes from the researcher are perfectly reasonable, and instead of extrapolating all of this nonsense, you should seek out the actual experimental write-up and see what it specifically addresses.

And indeed, as Volte pointed out, it is not an astonishing, controversial statement that the brain grows new tissue. It's even been shown that exercise promotes neural cell growth.

But I digress, 3rd party articles about research are just intended to give the average person a brief summary of the research conclusions. You can arrogantly assume that you are more aware of the relevant variables than the actual trained, 21st century neurological researcher, or you can seek out the detailed write-up and see whether the article's conclusions are valid. You shouldn't, however, just discard the claims as "extremely likely" to be false because you are able to think of some variables that may or may not have been addressed.

The proper response would have been: "For these conclusions to be valid, I think the researcher needs to have addressed this, this, and that, and I can't tell if he did from the few quotes in the article."

Better luck next time.

EDIT: By the way, you are reading way too far into his statement about "1 hour of studying French text with 1 hour of listening." Do you think that's what he wrote in his write-up for the experiment? No, genius. It is the simplified version for mass-consumption. He's saying that an hour of typical text-based classroom study is not enough to make significant progress toward fluency, but if you supplement that with listening, you can start bridging that gap. (Given that logically it's impossible to learn a language from only listening to the radio, it stands to reason that he was not suggesting replacing all learning with listening. Ambiguity resolved.)

You can nitpick about the ambiguity in his quote, but the overall idea is very clear: He thinks that you need lots of listening practice (regardless of comprehension) if you want to learn a language.

If you want to be clear about what his research found, then consult the paper HE wrote, not some university article.

Edited by chelovek on 29 January 2009 at 3:29pm

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chelovek
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 Message 20 of 129
29 January 2009 at 3:33pm | IP Logged 
slucido,

I don't think he is promoting passive listening. There's a difference between listening to something you don't understand, and listening passively. I take "passively" to mean simply having the radio on as you have your attention focused on something else. Listening to something incomprehensible still suggests to me that it is active listening.

I mean, I'd be interested in the specifics of what he did and did not find, but I didn't see any mention of passive listening.
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slucido
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 Message 21 of 129
29 January 2009 at 3:48pm | IP Logged 
chelovek wrote:
slucido,

I don't think he is promoting passive listening. There's a difference between listening to something you don't understand, and listening passively. I take "passively" to mean simply having the radio on as you have your attention focused on something else. Listening to something incomprehensible still suggests to me that it is active listening.

I mean, I'd be interested in the specifics of what he did and did not find, but I didn't see any mention of passive listening.


I am using this article to talk about unconscious,implicit, subliminal learning and I give interesting scientific evidence. I have used the word "passive" in a broad sense, but if you read the previous scientific articles, you will find one of them against this "passive" concept.

Psychophysics: Is subliminal learning really passive?

Aaron R. Seitz1 & Takeo Watanabe
Nature 422, 36 (6 March 2003) | doi:10.1038/422036a


I am just talking about hearing and not bothering if you understand or not or if you are paying attention or not.

If you listen, but you don't understand anything, you are activating unconscious processes. If you hear without paying attention, you are activating unconscious process in spite of using or not using comprehensible audio input, because you are not listening.

Mere hearing the language (consciously, but UNconsciously too) is useful at all levels (from absolutely ignorant to advanced). Obviously it is understood you are going to interact consciously with the language as well, sooner or later.

With this subliminal and unconscious audio exposition (input), you will activate neurological processes that will facilitate a lot your language learning.

In the last post I give a lot of interesting articles about the subject.





Edited by slucido on 29 January 2009 at 3:57pm

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Cainntear
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 Message 22 of 129
29 January 2009 at 4:36pm | IP Logged 
chelovek wrote:
But I digress, 3rd party articles about research are just intended to give the average person a brief summary of the research conclusions. You can arrogantly assume that you are more aware of the relevant variables than the actual trained, 21st century neurological researcher,

Pedagogic researcher. What in the article makes you think he's into neurology? Note that he had been teaching Russian for 8 years before he decided to investigate this -- makes it pretty clear he's a teacher rather than a neuroscientist.
Quote:
You shouldn't, however, just discard the claims as "extremely likely" to be false because you are able to think of some variables that may or may not have been addressed.

The paper, like most PhD theses, is currently not available to the public.

It is everyone's right (and some would say duty) to be sceptical of claims when the evidence is not in the public domain.

While I may be a "layman" I've read a fair few papers on language learning and as a rule they take a standard learning approach and introduce a single innovation (or take out one thing, depending on the study).

As I said, there is no course that I'm aware of that builds up the speakers lexicon by the gradual, controlled introduction of new phonemes -- therefore there is no baseline for him to begin from.

If he had genuinely explored this variable, it would have been newsworthy, as it would have meant developing such a course -- a potentially massive undertaking, involving quite a lot of statistical work. It would have been mentioned. In fact, it would probably have been considered even more significant than what the actual article talks about.

Quote:
EDIT: By the way, you are reading way too far into his statement about "1 hour of studying French text with 1 hour of listening."
[...]
You can nitpick about the ambiguity in his quote, but the overall idea is very clear:

If his idea was very clear, then he would not have been misunderstood. He was misunderstood by Raчraч Ŋuɲa, therefore his message was not clear.

You then proceeded to slag RŊ off for not understanding, never mind that he's not even a native English speaker. That's ridiculous behaviour and there's no place for that here. Grow up.
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40pancakes
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 Message 23 of 129
29 January 2009 at 6:33pm | IP Logged 
aYa wrote:
Cainntear,

Congratulations! A very long post again. I didn't read it.


Nice.
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skeeterses
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 Message 24 of 129
29 January 2009 at 6:42pm | IP Logged 
I took a short look at the article and agree somewhat with what the researcher and I'll explain. Quite some time ago, and I don't remember exactly which thread, people on this bulletin board were debating whether full-immersion or intensive input would be a good way to pick up a language. Anyway, somebody on that thread suggested that there is a difference between a carefully selected children's video and watching Spanish soap operas for 10 hours a day.

Basically, the idea is that if a person watches children TV shows in a foreign language and the vocabulary is at the learner's level, the foreign language student could learn basic words by hearing them repeated during the show, you know like children watching Sesame Street and learning their numbers and colors. And that's probably what the researcher was thinking when he wrote the article but he didn't mention it exactly.


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