The Key to Multilingualism Lies in the Ears, Not the Mouth

Steve Martin’s favorite comic moment of his entire career is the “hamburger” scene from The Pink Panther (2006), he once told People magazine. Martin plays Inspector Clouseau, who has an aggressively exaggerated French accent. In the scene, he is trying to learn how to say, “I would like to buy a hamburger,” with a dialect coach.

The scene is funny because it’s true for so many of us: Learning a new language as an adult can be hard. The unfamiliar sounds may get tangled up in the mouth like marbles, and the results can sound like gibberish. But for other people, new foreign words seem to roll off the tongue and adopting different accents comes easily.

Their secret may lie in how they listen, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. People who are better at detecting small differences in the frequency of raw sound are better at picking up new foreign speech sounds, and thus might be quicker to learn new languages, the study found. These participants were tasked with figuring out which of three artificial tones was not like the others, based on small shifts in frequency.

They also listened to spoken English and were asked to identify the words they heard. In a second experiment, 67 people underwent a brain scan while they judged whether pairs of English words and pairs of non-speech tones were the same or different. What the team found: The more minute differences in tones people could discern, the better they were at telling the words in the pairs apart.

While time spent studying abroad or getting training in pronunciation also made a significant difference, auditory perception mattered even when accounting for these differences in experience. It was a medium-sized effect and showed up in both experiments. Having a good ear for small shifts in sound frequency was also linked to differences in how the brain processed the words from a new language.

The learners who scored less well on hearing differences in non-speech sounds seemed to rely more on parts of the brain’s sensorimotor cortex, which is responsible for movement planning and feedback when hearing the English vowels. But this pattern wasn’t detected for the non-speech tones. Sait-van Poeteren and his colleagues wrote that adults who are less skilled at hearing differences in sound may try to map unfamiliar words onto sounds in their own native language, partly by silently simulating how they’d say it.