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. “Dam-buergaaaaa,” he purrs at his coach, along with increasingly ridiculous permutations of all of the other words in the sentence.
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.
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“Most people approach foreign language learning by memorizing vocabulary and listening to speech, but our study indicated that language learners might also benefit from training the auditory abilities that underpin language learning itself,” said study author Kazuya Sait-van Poeteren of the UCL Institute of Education in London, in a statement. “Foreign language education should move beyond an approach based on ‘more practice’ and towards one that develops learners’ ear for language learning in line with their auditory characteristics.”
Sait-van Poeteren and colleagues from the United Kingdom, Japan, and Switzerland studied Japanese students learning the English vowels in a series of word pairs, such as “mad” versus “mud.” In an initial experiment, they delivered a test of auditory perception to 140 people online. 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. This can keep them stuck. People with sharp hearing may be able to bypass this filter, though, tuning out their linguistic past, and treating new sound more like raw acoustics, though the study didn’t demonstrate that directly. Their hypothesis aligns with the results of earlier studies that suggest that requiring learners to pronounce a new sound too early can interfere with how well they learn to hear it.
The new study findings echo previous work by the same group that shows that strong auditory perception that is not tied to speech is predictive of better pronunciation when a person is learning a second language. But these earlier studies mostly showed a behavioral link. The current study is among the first to use brain imaging to try to tease out how weaker or stronger auditory precision relates to brain activity during second-language listening.
Musical training was not a major predictor of the participants’ skill at hearing differences between the words in the new language. What mattered was the measured ability to hear small acoustic differences.
Clouseau’s trouble with that hamburger seemed to lie in the mouth—with each new attempt he would contort his lips into a new shape to try to capture the word. But the new research suggests that when learning a new language, it’s best to start by fine tuning the ears. 
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