The readings for this week is about how variations in speech can affect the way we understand and comprehend spoken words. The readings made me recall two relevant observations I made back when I was in a national curriculum school in Thailand.
In middle school, most of my friends had heavy Thai accented English. They had decent vocabulary, grammar and reading skills, but what struck me most was the fact that they all had difficulty listening to speakers in British or American English. They either said the speaker was speaking too fast, or the speech was simply incomprehensible. However, after I tried repeating the speech to them in a Thai accented English, which includes transcribing English sounds into the Thai alphabet, and stressing only at the end of the word, like pronouncing “HAM-bur-ger” as “ham-bur-GER”. It turns out that they were able to easily comprehend it.
The first observation agrees with the paper by Sumner and Kataoka that people are quicker, and more efficient in understanding spoken language when it is in their own dialect. In this particular case, my friends are used to strong accent speeches, so they had a hard time understanding American and British accents.
When I was in high school, I tried pronouncing loanwords from English, like the word “electronics” or “copy” with an English accent while I am speaking in Thai, my friends will say I am being “pretentious” and my speech was confusing. On the other hand, foreigners, who have the ability to speak Thai, also speak the same English loanwords with an English accent. Yet, no one finds their speech confusing.
The second observation is similar to the point stated by the King and Sumner paper that people tend to have trouble understanding spoken language when the wordings do not match the perceived image of the speaker. For the case of me speaking in an English accent, my sound is similar to a foreigner but my perceived image is a Thai. This inconsistency sometimes lead to confusion, and annoyance to certain people. While the native English speakers are expected to pronounce those words in an English accent, so it is not annoying.
Variance in spoken language can affect how language is comprehended, and sometimes in a confusing and irritating way. Effective communicators need to know the context of the listeners, and how they are perceived by the listeners to ensure clear understanding and avoid unwanted feelings, which undermines their communication.
I really enjoyed your narrative recounting your experiences with Thai. I find that I encounter similarly interesting experiences when I speak Chinese in Asia, when inconsistencies arise between my image and speech and my English pronunciation of loan words differ from the native Chinese speaker's standards.
ReplyDeleteI thought that your narrative was really interesting! I grew up in the Bay Area, but my school was largely Asian; one of my classmates would speak perfectly fluent English to her peers, but to her Indian relatives, she would speak with a pretty heavy Indian accent. The transition was pretty much subconscious, but I'm sure she was aware that each dialect was more understandable for that certain group of listeners.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny how we regard some languages as prestigious, like British English. I think it's very interesting how you said your friends thought English was pretentious; if we asked individuals who speak British English to listen to a GA speaker, would they identify that speaker as "pretentious" or "prestigious"? Intuitively, I would think most would say no, which just goes to show the relativity of all of these terms.