How to Understand Accents Better
A native speaker and a foreigner enter the bar.
I know I know; bear with me. They walk into the bar and it’s happy hour, so they settle down and order a drink and there is some background noise. They are new acquaintances, maybe colleagues, and they are trying to get to know each other better. But the conversation between them is a little slower, a little more unnatural than if two native speakers had the same conversation.
As linguist and cognitive scientist Melissa Michaud Baz-Burke writes for Quartz , this is due to the fact that non-native speech is more difficult for a native speaker listener to understand. In other words, it can be more difficult to understand someone with an accent, even if they speak your native language well.
Non-native speech differs from native speech in a number of parameters, ranging from how individual sounds are reproduced, and ending with the speed of speech. All of these acoustic qualities can make it difficult for native speakers to understand foreign speech. This is similar to how other types of listening problems can affect perception – think of the difficulty of listening to speech at a noisy cocktail party.
Often, the onus is on those who are not native speakers to work to make them easier to understand. But the listener can do even more to make the conversation successful. Basically, Baez-Burke says , they can train. Look for non-native speakers of media such as television, movies, radio, or podcasts to get a better understanding of acoustics and speech tempo.
If a native English speaker spends some time listening to English with a Mandarin or French accent, not only will they understand better speakers from China, France and Thailand, but the effect is likely to spread to speakers from Guatemala, Korea and Russia. … Researchers, myself included, are still researching the exact mechanisms behind this adaptation.
If you still can’t figure it out, you can start by slowing down your own speech, writes the Muse editor :
When the phone rings, I let it ring once or twice and then take a deep breath before answering. Whether I’m on the phone or in person, I force myself to speak slowly and just below an octave, which in turn forces others to do the same and makes the conversation easier.
If you are missing important words or phrases, start by asking the other person to repeat them; if that doesn’t work, ask follow-up questions to clarify the context, or have them say a word you don’t understand. Repeat what you heard to be sure of its meaning. Writing notes, especially in a professional setting, can also help slow down the pace of a conversation and make it more obvious where you are missing key information.
Keep inviting these conversations into your personal and professional life, and over time, whatever you listen to will lead to better understanding.
This story was updated at 1:02 PM on August 1, 2019 to properly attribute the article from Muse. It was originally credited to the wrong author on the Muse website.