We have a confession. After more than thirty years studying Spanish, we still struggle, sometimes badly. Not so much when reading! There’s nothing like a Kindle and its dictionaries to help with all those tricky words. Or even when listening to things like the news and weather on the TV. No, it’s when a group of them are talking excitedly, perhaps in the studio during a football match. That’s when it comes out like: YélbalónestáconhaveeuupasuhdelanterocouthojMadreepotpourrismamporrerodeharrikane chichinaboakadebandamenaosmalmalgooooooooooooooooaol! And that’s on a good day.

Now an article from the multi-learned Nicola Davis[1] of the Guardian suggests what may be going wrong. Up to know, we have always assumed to that one listens to individual words and then assembles them into a meaningful pattern. But according to Professor Liina Pylkkanen of New York University, something different may be happening. It seems humans recognise groups of words, sometimes very fast indeed. And this happens when they are in the grammatical pattern of the listeners native language. In English this is Subject-Verb-Object. And the Professor even seems to have found a region of the brain where this may be occurring.

Of course, none of this is to say that one cannot acquire a really fluent understanding of another language. We know this, because we’ve met people who are much, much better at it than we are. But it does shed light on what to do if you want to get better at your listening skills, Yes, books are a fantastic way to begin to build a vocabulary, word by word. But there will come a time when we have to tackle those words in groups, unbroken by the gaps which you find in a text. The trick is to pick out recurring groups of words. Thank you Nicola. Thank you Professor Pylkkannen.

//www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/23/human-brain-can-process-certain-sentences-in-blink-of-an-eye-says-study

#neurology #linguistics #language learning #nicola davis #spanish