Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist offers unconventional tip for learning new languages

If you've ever spent hours memorising vocabulary and grammar in a new language, only to find yourself completely lost when a native speaker starts talking, your ears might be part of the problem.

New research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that people who are better at detecting tiny differences between sounds may have an advantage when learning a new language.

The challenge is that our brains spend years learning which sounds matter in our native language. We become so good at recognising familiar sounds that we struggle to distinguish unfamiliar ones.

For example, Cantonese speakers learning English may find it difficult to distinguish certain vowels, such as the sounds in cat and bed. It's not that their hearing is worse, but that their brains have learned to organise sounds differently.

To investigate this, researchers studied Japanese learners of English and tested how accurately they could distinguish subtle differences in sounds.

Rather than just playing English words, the researchers also used non-speech sounds, testing whether participants could detect tiny changes in pitch, duration and other acoustic features. This allowed them to measure how precisely someone could hear differences without relying on their language knowledge.

They then used functional MRI brain scans to investigate what happened when participants listened to unfamiliar English vowel sounds.

The results revealed that people better at detecting subtle sound differences showed less activity in a brain network involved in connecting sounds with familiar speech patterns. Those with less precise hearing relied more heavily on this network.

The research suggests that your brain's expertise in your native language might sometimes get in the way of learning a new one.

So, does this mean we should spend less time memorising vocabulary and more time training our ears? Possibly, although this particular study didn't test whether auditory training improves language learning.

Earlier research by the same team suggests we can. In a 2022 experiment, scientists divided 98 Japanese learners of English into four groups. Some practised distinguishing unfamiliar English vowels, others trained their ears using non-speech sounds, a third group combined both approaches, and a fourth acted as a control.

The results found that practising listening to sounds that aren't even words helped people recognise sounds in a foreign language.