The short version
- Japanese students who were better at telling two close tones apart were also better at hearing the English vowels in “cat” and “cup”.
- That listening skill mattered about as much as time spent abroad or pronunciation lessons.
- Brain scans hinted that weaker listeners lean on the brain’s speech-movement areas, but that result was not formally tested.
Kazuya Saito-van Poeteren of the UCL Institute of Education and colleagues at Tohoku University tested 140 Japanese university students learning English. On headphones, the students judged which of two plain tones was higher, with differences down to 2 Hz, and identified the English vowels in words like “cat” and “cup”, a contrast Japanese does not make. They averaged about 70% on the vowels, against near-perfect scores from native British speakers. Students with sharper tone discrimination identified the vowels more accurately whatever their study history, and the skill counted about as much as time abroad or pronunciation lessons. The study is in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
In a second experiment, 67 of the students were scanned with fMRI in Sendai. Weaker listeners showed more activity in left-hemisphere regions that plan speech movements while judging vowels. “Learners with a ‘good ear’ for auditory differences can hear a new foreign-language sound objectively, without immediately processing it as ‘language’,” Saito-van Poeteren said.
The study tested listening only, at one point in time, in one language pair, and the scan pattern was reported as a trend without formal statistics. It is the same idea as our blindness and pitch brief: the gain sits in how the brain handles sound, not in the ear.
