Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Grasping Haptic II: Haptic presence

So what does it "feel" like, what is the "felt sense," when one is fully engaged in haptic-integrated pronunciation work? About the best term or metaphor I have encountered is "grasp," in the sense that McLuhan was alluding to (掴む 'tsukamu' in Japanese is even better.) It entails both perception of the object or person and the sensation of near-physical presence or connectedness to it. In this piece by Abeele et al (2007) the discussion of the distinction between social presence and connectedness points to the key notion in haptic anchoring: the former is entirely outward directed; the latter, more  internal, emotional.

In other words, effective haptic anchoring depends upon being able to totally embrace, momentarily, the somatic (body), internal sensations of a sound--completely disregarding "incoming" data and stimulation:  total, undivided attention! The ability to do that should later result in both more efficient monitoring of--and integration of new sounds into--spontaneous speech. And that is easily within the 掴む of any learner.

1 comment:

  1. Hat tip to my colleague Nori Takatsu for his consultation on the Japanese term for "grasp." The Japanese script for that word in the post contains both the Chinese character and the Japanese native-script, hiragana. Since the representation of my last name in Japanese (which I chose) begins with that same Chinese character, I was well aware of something of its broader meaning and usage but I needed more than a little confirmation! Domo! Nori!

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