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Thanks for reading the Multilingual Books newsletter, your source for foreign language news, information, and product information and specials from Multilingual Books. This is also available as a web page at our website, www.multilingualbooks.com. In this issue:
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Adults can be retrained to learn second languages more easily, says UCL scientist
Public release from eurekalert.org
Our ability to hear and understand a second language becomes more and more difficult with age, but the adult brain can be retrained to pick up foreign sounds more easily again. This finding, reported by Dr Paul Iverson of the UCL Centre for Human Communication, at the "Plasticity in Speech Perception 2005" workshop - builds on an important new theory that the difficulties we have with learning languages in later life are not biological and that, given the right stimulus, the brain can be retrained.
It is an accepted fact that the younger the child, the easier it is for them to learn a second language. Children are able to understand words and hear small sound differences that adults often miss ? making understanding more difficult for adults. For example, Polish students of English have difficulty differentiating between vowels such as "pen" and "pan" while German students must learn to hear a difference between the v in "vest" and the w in "west".
Scientists used to believe that the adult brain could not be retrained later in life to distinguish between these sounds: in other words the brain's plasticity (or ability to change) was set.
Dr Iverson shows that adults can retune their brains to hear these differences again. Scientists now believe that the difficulties are caused by our experience which teaches us to ignore certain sounds so that we are able to give our full attention to the sounds that (in our native language) matter most to understanding a sentence.
Two studies jointly worked on by Dr Paul Iverson and Dr Valerie Hazan, 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 UK for more than 20 years.
In the Japanese training study, the subjects improved their recognition of l's and r's by an average of 18%. So, for example, if an individual could identify the difference between r and l 60% of the time, at the end of training they would be able to get this correct 78% of the time - supporting the view that the brain can be retuned.
Talking at the UCL workshop, which brings together specialists in language, speech and speech perception, Dr Iverson said: "Adult learning does not appear to become difficult because of a change in neural plasticity. Rather, we now think that learning becomes hard because experience with our first language 'warps' perception. We see things through the lens of our native language and that 'warps' the way we see foreign languages.
"It is very difficult to undo this learning. That is, we change our perception during childhood so that it becomes specialized to hear the speech sounds in our first language. This specialization can conflict with our ability to learn to distinguish sounds in other languages. Through training, we can essentially change our 'perceptual warping' to make second-language learning easier. I hope that this research will lead to new ways of training adults to learn second languages."
See the entire release at: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-06/potn-acb061405.php
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Foreign Service Institute Thai 2 Released on CD
Multilingual Books is proud to announce our latest FSI (Foreign Service Institute) course CD release: FSI Thai 2! Our exclusive versions have the quality and convenience of a CD along with the top-notch language teaching methods that the Foreign Service is famous for. Each new version has been carefully digitally remastered for greatly improved sound quality as compared to the commonly available cassette courses or even other FSI vendors and is exclusive to Multilingual Books. We now have FSI or DLI courses available remastered on CD in over 15 languages including: Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Cantonese, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Iraqi, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, and Thai. Find out more about our FSI courses at our
FSI page. Find out more about our Thai offerings at our Thai page.
June Top Products
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Last month's trivia questions and answers: What are the 10 most spoken languages other than English in the USA? This month's winner is... Whoops. We seem to have misplaced all the entries to last month's trivia question. If you were waiting to see if you won, don't despair: Dig through your outbox, resend your entry and we will take the first correct answer we receive and announce the winner next month. Thanks to everyone who entered and congratulations in advance to this month's winner. This month's trivia quiz: Summer's here - time to hit the beach! What are the languages and English translations of these summer-themed words?
Plage The answers and the winner will be in our next newsletter. Winner will receive their choice of one Talk Now or World Talk language CD-ROM! No purchase necessary to enter. E-mail your entry to:
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Language Identifier
From the research labs at Xerox comes this free web tool that you may find useful, amusing or both: Enter a sentence of 5 or more words and the language identifier will identify the language from a field of 47 languages. There are other language tools in their technology demo section including text analysis tools for 14 languages.
Check it out at http://www.xrce.xerox.com/competencies/content-analysis/tools/guesser-ISO-8859-1.en.html.
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Save 25% on All FSI and Platiquemos Products!
Platiquemos Spanish Course
Foreign Service Institute Courses For a limited time, save 25% on your order of any FSI or Platiquemos products! One week only. Use promo code MB-FP25-622 to receive this special. Order today! |
 
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Save 10% on All Software Products! For a limited time, save 10% on any software products, including Talk Now, Tell Me More, and many more! Talk Now and World Talk CD-ROM Courses
Tell Me More Version 6 For a limited time, save 10% on any software products! Order today to save with our one week only newsletter special! Use promo code MB-SW10-622 to receive this special. |
  
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FREE Shipping on Language Littles Speaking Dolls and Muzzy Videos!
Language Littles Speaking Dolls Muzzy in Gondoland Videos Save with FREE standard shipping (US orders only) on Language Littles dolls or Muzzy courses for one week only! Use promo code MB-FSLM-622 to receive this special. |
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