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Cultural industries

Want to understand accented speakers better? Practice, practice, practice

Source: The Conversation, April 3d 2019

Conversation is at the heart of people’s lives. We use language to communicate our hopes and dreams to our closest friends, to ask for help from colleagues at work and to describe our ailments to medical professionals. Typically this process of communication goes fairly smoothly.

But there are circumstances that can make communication even between two healthy adults more challenging – consider the native language background of the two participants. It’s commonly understood that non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech, and this challenge can result in communication failures.

As a linguist and cognitive scientist, I’m interested in the half of the conversation equation that often gets overlooked: the native listener. Given that, worldwide, there are more non-native speakers of English than native speakers, this is an especially interesting topic to consider here in the United States. Read more... >>>>>