“Lellow, Lellow!” Shouts one of my 4-year-old Bumblebees after I announce that our next activity involves Play-Doh. Colours seem to carry a real emotional weight at this age- his excitement is hilariously frantic.
I smile. I don’t just do this because his mispronunciation is cute- it also happens to be the easiest way to correct him. Grinning and pointing to my mouth, I make an exaggerated “eeeee” sound before slowly repeating “yellow.”
In moments like these, it makes me chuckle to think of my own and my younger brother’s childhood mispronunciations. I spent years calling “water” by the name of “wadu.” My brother once mistakenly referred to his “growth spurt” as a “gross bird.” My family has never allowed either of us to forget.
Of course, learning a new language with its own set of sounds makes for a lot of fun moments like these at Casita de Inglés. A snag that catches almost all of my students is the phrase “Luke, look!” (which as you might imagine comes up a lot!). That particular double-O sound in “look” doesn’t exist in Spanish; the best way I have to demonstrate it is by exaggeratedly pinching the sides of my mouth inwards and making a “deuhhhhh” sound like some kind of Homer Simpson impression. Half the time this impression leads the kids to assume I’m correcting their pronunciation of my name (why would a normal word sound so weird? I imagine them thinking). Oh well.
As cute as these pronunciation hiccups are at a young age, mastering sounds like these and their corresponding spelling conventions become important over time for clear, confident communication in English. That’s why at Casita, we play games to target early awareness and production of English phonemes.
What are phonemes and how do they play into language development?
Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that exist within a language. For example, a phoneme could be the buzzy, closed-mouthed “mmmm” sound we make when we think of the letter “M” (or cook a good meal). It could be the percussive tongue-flick of the letter “T”, or its softer, vocalized sister “D” (the latter often takes the spotlight in North American accents). Sometimes phonemes arise from combinations of letters, like the “sshhh” sound we might make when kids are on their 5,000th round of singing the chorus from KPop Demon Hunter’s “Golden.”
English has around 46 unique phonemes, but there are thousands more across all of the world’s languages (Quadir, 2020). In the earliest years of life, human babies are able to hear the difference between all phonemes that exist. Unlike adults, infants have an innate ability to detect even the slightest variations between sounds in languages that are foreign to them (Kuhl, 2004). The human brain is magnificently flexible in these early years; we are born ready to pick up whatever language we are exposed to and immersed in.
Infants and young kids learn their native language(s) almost entirely through verbal input. According to statistical learning theory, kids pick up a language through a subconscious process of recognizing the probabilities of different sounds occurring together in succession, like how “ma” often comes with another “ma” for “mama” (Saffran et al., 1996). This process of perceiving co-occurring sounds allows kids to identify words from the connected string of speech that they hear when their parents are talking.
Phonemes are the building blocks of understanding and producing written language, too. As kids grow older, they link sounds to spelling conventions, which is why they sound out words as they begin to learn how to read and write. Vocabulary and grammar structures develop over time, and by puberty most kids would be considered naturally fluent in their native language.
As this process of language development unfolds, so too does a process of perceptual narrowing in children’s brains. Brain networks form to streamline kids’ perception and production of the sounds in the language(s) that they are in contact with; meanwhile, they become less attuned to the phonemes that they don’t hear as often (Kuhl, 2004). In other words, at an early age the brain can create overlapping networks for more than one native language (Bloch et al., 2009); but as time goes on, languages that kids aren’t exposed to growing up become more and more challenging to learn.
While language learning is a life-long process, a large body of research now suggests that the brain is especially primed for learning languages prior to puberty; this is known as the critical period of language learning (e.g. Johnson & Newport, 1989). That’s why at Casita, we know that awareness and mastery of English phonemes at a young age is a foundational step in developing future confident speakers.
Why Casita’s diversity matters
One of the strengths of Casita de Ingles is the diversity among our native-English speaking teachers. Our students’ ears don’t just become trained to recognize one specific accent. Over time at Casita, they might encounter English accents from Ireland, Australia, Canada (hi!), the U.S., England… All over the place!
Part of why this is incredibly important is because it reflects the real-world diversity of English that kids will encounter in their lives. There are an estimated 160 different English accents spoken around the world- enough for an entire Wikipedia page! An episode of the Canadian kids T.V. series Paw Patrol is going to sound very different from the English you might hear on a summer trip to the Scottish Isles. A rewatch of Mary Poppins featuring Julie Andrews’ classic Received Pronunciation will sound very different from a conversation with an American friend who grew up in New York City. The point is, the earlier we introduce the diversity of real-world English to kids, the more we can take advantage of the incredible flexibility in their still-developing brains.
At Casita de Ingles, we’re proud to prepare kids for English beyond the classroom. By fostering early phonetic awareness, we set our students up for success to understand English across a range of contexts, for life.
After all, behind every perfectly pronounced “yellow” is a Bumblebee brave enough to shout “lellow” first.
References
Bloch, C., Kaiser, A., Kuenzli, E., Zappatore, D., Haller, S., Franceschini, R., Luedi, G., Radue, E.-W., & Nitsch, C. (2009). The age of second language acquisition determines the variability in activation elicited by narration in three languages in broca’s and Wernicke’s area. Neuropsychologia, 47(3), 625–633. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.11.009
Johnson, J. S., & Newport, E. L. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive Psychology, 21(1), 60–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(89)90003-0
Kuhl, P. K. (2004). Early language acquisition: Cracking the Speech Code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5(11), 831–843. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1533
Quadir, S. (2020, February 21). Speech sounds in the world’s languages. City St George’s, University of London. https://www.citystgeorges.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2020/02/speech-sounds-in-the-worlds-languages
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274(5294), 1926–1928. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.274.5294.1926