Sophia Jung: Mutual Intelligibility - How Do People Understand
Each Other?
To this day, linguists continue to develop and modify methods of
accurately transcribing phonetics. Articulatory phonetics, the production of
speech and sounds, states that a good phonetic transcription should be “consistent
and unambiguous” (40). However, speech is not standardized, nor is it visual.
Not everyone speaks as is written, no matter how consistent and unambiguous a
phonetic transcription may be. In fact, when words are put together, people
often pronounce the neighboring words differently.
That got me thinking: how do people understand each other when
they speak with different accents? For example, if I pronounce the word tomato
as [təˈmeɪtoʊ], but my friend pronounces the word
tomato as [təˈmaːtəʊ], how do I know my friend is saying tomato, when I don’t
pronounce the word the same way my friend does?
Mutual intelligibility states
that within the same language, people can understand each other despite the pronunciation,
vocabulary, and grammar differences (410). In fact, “every speaker speaks his
own idiolect, because no two speakers of a language or a dialect speak in
exactly the same way” (411). But how does mutual intelligibility come about? Sure,
I may be able to intuitively deduce that [təˈmaːtəʊ] is tomato. However, when
it comes to longer phrases, especially those of different dialects, comprehension
becomes more difficult. Therefore, I believe that, even within the same
language, a person has to be familiar with the different pronunciation of words
before he or she is able to hear and properly analyze utterances of different
accents.
I am a native Korean
speaker, and I moved to the United States when I was nine years old. I grew up
in the Bay Area, so although I learned English pretty quickly, I never forgot
Korean because there were a lot of Korean-Americans in the community. I never
had trouble understanding the Korean-American adults, whether they spoke
perfect English or broken English, because I grew up hearing my parents speak
English with a Korean accent. For example, my dad can’t pronounce [f], [z], and
[l] sounds. In addition, some Korean vowels differ from English vowels, so for
many years, my dad couldn’t pronounce (nor hear) the differences between
‘leave’ [liːv] and ‘live’ [lɪv].
If I hear ‘live’ being
pronounced as [liːv] for the first time, I would be confused. But when I hear
it a second time, I would remember the last time I heard ‘live’ being
pronounced that way, and I would be able to process the message faster. Soon, I
would get used to it. Simply put, I would be able to understand someone
speaking in a different accent or dialect because I’ve heard it before.
Nonetheless, after spending a year at Stanford, I realized not
only had I forgotten a lot of Korean, I’ve also gotten rusty at understanding
English spoken with a Korean accent. For example, I have to focus more than
before in order to correctly understand Korean adults speaking Korean-accented
English. More often than not, when I am not paying enough attention, I
completely miss what they say and I have to apologetically ask them to repeat
themselves.
The textbook does mention that “although the principle of mutual
intelligibility is useful in theory, from a practical standpoint,” it all
depends on how native speakers perceive the language and the different dialects
(410). Has my perception of Korean-accented English changed? Can people forget
how to understand different pronunciations, just like how people can forget a
language if unused?
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This is such an interesting question. When I took Spanish in high school, my teacher put a large emphasis on accents. We often listened to recordings of Spanish speakers from different countries. Between Mexico, Spain, Central America, and South America, there were more than a few accents to choose between. Switching from one to the next was jarring, especially when the accents were unfamiliar to me; I'm far from a fluent speaker, and I certainly wasn't used to hearing some of the more obscure accents. It took a great deal of focus to decode the conversation to which I was listening.
ReplyDeleteHowever, in a language I'm more comfortable with (English), accents don't pose a problem. British English accents--or the accents of non-native English speakers--aren't usually all that for native English speakers to understand.
I wonder how much of this has to do with language familiarity, and how much is just from the accent. Would I have understood the Spanish conversations better if they were only in the Mexican accent that was standard for my previous Spanish classes? Does it help or hurt to hear a foreign language with the accent of your native tongue?
Re: why Korean-accented English seems so foreign to you now, I can think of a couple of explanations rooted in psychological experiments on memory. One is this concept of “retroactive interference” (i.e. new information interferes with the ability to retrieve older information). Barnes & Underwood (1959) had subjects study a list of word-pairs (List 1), then a new list of word-pairs (List 2) containing one word from List 1 and a novel word never before seen. If they saw “bread-paper” in List 1 and “bread-rock” in List 2, they would have a harder time recalling that “bread” paired with “paper” in List 1. This is similar to the concept of “retrieval induced forgetting” (i.e. practicing retrieval for some words enhances memory for those words while impairing memory for highly-related words). For example, suppose I have you memorize a list of fruits, and then have you practice retrieving from memory some fruits (e.g. grape) but not others (e.g. banana) by presenting you with questions that elicit “grape” (e.g. Name a purple fruit, Fill in the missing letters for this fruit: gr_p_) and no questions that elicit “banana.” Extrapolating from data in experiments like this, you will have a harder time remembering the word “banana” than “grape” – in fact, you will also have a harder time remembering the word “banana” than words from non-fruit categories like color, beverages, animals etc.
ReplyDeleteTo tie this to your topic, you may be having a harder time with Korean-accented English because while in college, you had more exposure to non-Korean-accented English than Korean-accented English on a daily basis. This could have had the effect of weakening your brain’s internal memory representation of Korean-accented English. Moreover, if you had more exposure to other accents/dialects of English (e.g. British, American South, Ebonics), then the word , for example, may have become even more ambiguous than before: Not only would you have to map it to [li:v] and [lɪv] as you did before coming to Stanford, but you would now also have to map it to a host of other pronunciations. This increase in ambiguity may mean your brain has to process a greater cognitive load than before.
A related explanation may have less to do with memory interference or forgetting and more to do with primacy effects. If, while at Stanford, you had become accustomed to hearing non-Korean-accented English on a daily basis, then you may have become “primed” to look out for those sounds. Then when you went back home, you may have retained, perhaps sub-consciously, the expectation that you would hear these non-Korean-accented sounds as opposed to Korean-accented sounds. When you heard Korean-accented English at home again, it may have taken a while for you to re-wire or update your expectations (i.e. cognitively shifting from expecting to hear non-Korean-accented English to expecting to hear Korean-accented English). Something like this has happened to me before. While in French class in high school, it took me a while to realize that the speaker in a video that was playing in the background was speaking French because she said it with a Quebecois accent rather than the standard French accent that was usually used in the instructional videos we watched. Another personal anecdote that does not have to do with accents but is related to expectations of what sounds to hear: When I was studying abroad in Germany, I remember sitting in a train, across a couple of tourists who were talking and gesturing over a map. In my head, I was thinking, “What is this harsh, cacophonous language they’re speaking? It’s definitely not standard German. Could it be some dialect of German? Russian? Polish? Oh, but it sounds so harsh, so awful! What could it be?!” When I finally got up to leave, I was able to inch closer, and realized to my chagrin that they were speaking standard American English all along! I just wasn’t expecting to hear English, since I hadn’t heard it in a while.
I agree with the point that our perception and understanding of particular accents of a language are greatly molded by our surroundings and found your discussion very insightful. It also got me thinking of another question: how do we change our own accent (intonation, slang, pronunciation) for a given language depending on our surroundings?
ReplyDeleteThis question is especially interesting to me since I a native Spanish speaker from Guatemala, and as Laura pointed out, although Spanish is the main language throughout Latin America it is spoken differently everywhere you go. Here at Stanford many of my close friends are from Argentina and I have noticed how when I am with them I do not speak like a Guatemalan. Instead, I speak my own unique variant of an Argentinian accent by noticeably elongating the pronunciation of my vowels. However, what is so amazing to me is how the minute I go back home I immediately can transfer over to my native accent without consciously thinking about. So in some fashion I live in a sort of transient language dualism dictated by my immediate surroundings.
I definitely believe it is possible for a person to understand many different accents, however, is it possible for one person to have two or more different accents for the same language?
One example that I find surprising to this day, along the lines of what Nicolas mentions, is the way I pronounce my name. I am a native Spanish speaker, and my name is Cristian. Yet I have always considered language to be a tool to appeal to the listener, so how I introduce myself in English has a radically different pronunciation than how I introduce myself in Spanish.
ReplyDeleteThis belief not only extends to my name, but also to many other cross-linguistic words out there. I do not pronounce the words "El Camino Real", or "San Francisco" with a Spanish pronunciation when I'm giving directions to other students or tourists. In the same way that I don't say "Internet" or "Facebook" with an English pronunciation when I'm talking to my friends at home.
Adding on to Nicolas' question, can we have different accents for different languages when one language finds itself in another's conversation?
From Sophia’s discussion on accents and dialects, I was most struck by the question: when do accents and dialects cease to be merely variations of a language but instead become languages of their own?
ReplyDeleteIn the Romance Language or Latin language family, Italian, Spanish, French all descended from a form of Latin but are considered distinct languages today. On the other hand, the myriad of Chinese dialects are considered merely variations of the same language. I speak Mandarin and the Shanghainese dialect. Almost no word comes to my mind that is pronounced the same across Mandarin and Shanghainese. In fact, there are many expressions in the dialect that cannot be translated one-to-one into Mandarin.
However, one Chinese dialect has become somewhat accepted as a different language than Mandarin—Cantonese. Historically, Cantonese has been the traditional spoken language of China until the Manchu conquest gave rise to the proliferation of Mandarin.
At that point can linguists draw the boundary on language vs accent/dialect? It has seemed to me that linguistic overlap, history, distribution of speakers all play a factor in the decision.
To piggy-back off of what Cristian has said, it seems that our use of language is very circumstantial. Language is a tool that facilitates understanding between people, and so it wouldn’t make sense for you to say “Facebook” with an English accent when you are at home in Latin America. Another striking example of this is when a foreign student will call family abroad and shift their accent completely – perhaps to facilitate understanding. It would be interesting, however, to see when changes in accent or word choice are not made to improve understanding but as social markers. For example, you could very well go back home and say “Facebook” with an English accent to make a social statement. Despite this being a bit of an exaggerated example, I do believe that a motivator for certain word choices and accents are not understanding-driven but social markers of differentiation.
ReplyDeleteNow, to return to Sophia’s original point, I have the intuition that we have a model in our minds of words and the sounds needed to utter these words. When someone with a strong accent says a word, you subconsciously notice that a specific sound is distorted. Progressively, you make some sort of model in your mind of how this person utters specific sounds – which is then generalizable to the rest of their diction. These models, however, require upkeep or are otherwise forgotten. I can’t say if this is true or not, but it has helped me explain why I initially struggle to understand certain accents and then after sufficient contact with it, I am able to understand it.
Something that struck me as particularly interesting from this post was the notion of "Korean-accented English". We seem to take it for granted that native speakers of a language will adopt the same accent when speaking the same foreign language. This seems to be true of the poster's experience with korean-accented English and I have also found this true in my experience with Hebrew-accented English. However, it is actually kind of strange that speakers from the same native language speak English in the same accented way. After all, there are different accents and variations within a person's native language and therefore one would expect those variations to carry over to their accented version of English as well.
ReplyDeleteWonderful post Sophia!
ReplyDeleteI particularly am fascinated by the notion of losing the ability to understand a native accent. I knew it was possible to lose language (my inability to speak Hindi speaks for itself) but to lose the ability to understand an accent seems to take it to the next level. I never even noticed that about myself - I did find it more difficult to understand my cousins after not seeing them for 4 years. I assumed it was a hearing issue on my end.
On Cristian's point - I actually have experience that differs when it comes to accents. There are some words that I'll always say with an Indian accent. Words like butter, sword, and pizza are things I say with a tinge of that Indian accent - even when I speak to my American friends.
Of course, this may just be an example of experience and one outlier. I am known to be an odd character.
I think this is a very interesting post, and for me this reminded me of my own experiences learning Spanish as a second language last year. All of my teachers were from Latin America (non-Mexico), with two of my teachers being non-native speakers and spending a lot of time in Argentina. As was pointed out in class, non-native speakers are much more proficient at grammar, and I never found either instructor's accent to be confusing. However, I certainly had a much harder time comprehending Mexican and Iberian Spanish than I did at comprehending South American and Latin American Spanish. I think the non-standardization of language, as you have pointed out, while not necessarily an obstacle for language proficiency, is certainly an issue that new language speakers face with respect to language usage and conventions. As native speakers, we are more finely attuned to these differences, and have greater practice at adapting to individual idiolects. However, these idiolects, and the amount to which they vary, may make the language process more difficult for some languages which have a higher rate of variance, all other things considered equal.
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ReplyDeleteTo add a comment on Nicolas and Cristian’s questions, I believe it is perfectly possible for one to be able to speak (and actually do speak) different accents for the same language. As a native Korean speaker, I find this phenomenon happening to myself when I would talk in English with my Korean friends. When I insert Korean words or phrases into English sentences for ideas that I cannot articulate with a suitable English counterpart, I tend to speak them according to their English transcription as if they were English words, even if it is severely inconsistent with native Koreans’ pronunciation. Similar occurrences are observed when I use English words in Korean sentences.
ReplyDeleteAs I experience, speaking a language in a certain accent is highly dependent on the language’s appearance and placement in the sentences, rather than the social circumstances that the speaker is placed amid. That is, I would not pronounce Korean words in ways resembling English in order to facilitate the listener’s understanding or because the accuracy (or more appropriately, consistency with other native spekers) of my accents for Korean phrases is degrading; it is mostly due to the fact that I am speaking in English and the inertial effects from other English words in my sentence.
Thanks for the post, Sophia!
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question, I definitely believe that people can get unaccustomed to different dialects. I, like you, am an immigrant but from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; my family moved to Miami when I was 10. After spending two years away from my home country, we decided to go back and visit my extended family. To my despair, however, it was very difficult for me to speak with and understand my grandfather, who came from Bahia (another Brazilian state), and therefore had a different accent from my parents and brothers, who were the only people I had been constantly speaking with in Portuguese after we moved. For example, whenever he pronounced a word that had a sound in which I pronounce or was used to hearing pronounced as [o], my grandfather used the [ɔ] sound. He also changed the [ʌ] sound for the [ɑ] sound. These may seem like slight modifications, but when spoken at a fast pace, these subtleties certainly affected my level of comprehension.
The Stanford bubble is a very risk-free environment for learning and sharing languages. This can expedite the process of learning to understand someone who communicates differently from you, whether the difference is large or small.
ReplyDeleteAt home you can speak your language you grew up speaking, or use the accent that has been normal for you. When someone else comes to wherever you are from, and they speak differently, they stand out amongst the crowd. A foreign language, or a different accent, are quickly noticeable among locals, and although hostility is a worst case scenario, it doesn't necessarily help to be at a communication disadvantage.
On the side of the traveler, when going to a place where you don't care how you sound, you might also speak with the same accent, not caring how people will react to it. You also may consider trying to adapt to it, maybe to fit in, or even just to communicate better.
Living at Stanford is a different case though, because for a lot of us, this is not "close" to home. I think most of us here are aiming to thrive and embrace as much as we can, and communication is a part of that. We will make an active effort to communicate better with our peers here. Accents can share a lot about a person, and change happens on both sides to make communication better, whether it means understanding an accent, or speaking in a way more familiar to others. The willingness of the community to do both makes it different from the above two.
Given that all of the above is a conscious choice, I think with practice it's possible to maintain whatever way of speaking you would like to.
I really like Sophia’s points about how one’s ability to understand a certain accent might change over time. And I think not only does one’s ability to understand change over time, but often one’s own accent can change over time, depending on where and with whom the speaker is living and/or spending time.
ReplyDeleteI spent a year living in South America with a group of volunteers who came from all over the world and, collectively, spoke upwards of 20 languages. During that year, I lived immersed in overlapping languages and accents, surrounded by English that ranged from Australian to Nigerian to broken; by Spanish and broken Spanish; by Polish, Italian, and German; and by a plethora of constantly-mutating amalgams, such as questions posed in German-accented Spanish and answered in Italian-accented French. I’m by no means fluent in all the languages that were being spoken around me; in fact, no one member of our group was even close to fluent in every one of the languages that were spoken in our apartment on a daily basis. And yet somehow, using a mix of different languages and of even more accents, we all managed to understand one another. . . And I think all of our forms of speaking changed somewhat over time. After spending time with 2 of the Australian volunteers, I inadvertently began to pronounce some English words with an Australian accent (as opposed to my own American accent), often without even noticing. After spending a lot of time with one woman who spoke Spanish with a strong Italian accent, my own Spanish would sometimes contain an Italian inflection or two (even though previously my Spanish contained no hint of Italian); and yet afterwards, if I spent the majority of my time with my Colombian friends, surrounded by their Colombian Spanish, my accent would quickly revert to its previous form.
Sophia’s post and many of the comments make me wonder: to what degree are accents mutable? Does each speaker have some baseline accent which can never be completely eradicated, or can one’s linguistic surroundings cause one’s accent to change on a more fundamental level? And if so, how drastic a change is possible, and will that change be permanent or is there some natural tendency to revert to one’s original (or first-learned) accent?
I find it very interesting that after spending a year at Stanford hearing mostly what I assume is English with an American accent, you have encountered difficulty understanding English spoken with a Korean accent. As much as I think being familiar with an accent can be forgotten, it can also be learned even artificially. For instance, during senior year of high school, I played the immigrant Chinese-American Master Wang Chi-Yang in Rogers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. Because we were performing in the historic Hawai‘i Theatre located in Chinatown, Honolulu, where there is an Asian-American majority, my drama director gave me the daunting task of coming up with a believable yet non-racist Chinese accent. I essentially ended up inventing my own Chinese accent by analyzing videos of people speaking English with Chinese accents and imitating my distant Chinese-American relatives’ accents. Although this accent was entirely fabricated for entertainment purposes, I was surprised that I could better understand English spoken with in Chinese accent. Consequences of this accent fabrication could include the potential perpetuation of racial stereotypes and the evolution of accents.
ReplyDeleteThe role of immersion in understanding a language or, in this case, a dialect could be a reason for your difficulty understanding Korean-accented English. When in an immersive environment, we hear “foreign” sounds and pronunciations on a daily basis, which keeps the part of the brain regarding those sounds activated both consciously and subconsciously. For example, when I was in France over the summer and being constantly surrounded by French sounds, I found myself naturally thinking in French after just a few days. However, when I returned to an English-immersive environment, my mind quickly changed back into “English mode” as I no longer had constant auditory stimuli related to the French language.
ReplyDeleteI have found a similar phenomenon in my life when I interact continually with specific English speakers: after spending a significant amount of time with British friends I found myself subconsciously incorporating bits of British pronunciations into my own speech and understanding their accents more easily than before. Furthermore, after spending a prolonged amount of time with one of my friends (an American English speaker) I found my speech patterns and phrasing changing to match the subtle differences in her individual “accent.” Therefore, it seems like immersive experiences have similar effects on both a person’s native and non-native language. While being immersed in Korean-accented English, your mind learns to expect those sounds and therefore processes them faster, but once taken out of those surroundings your mind reverts back to expectations of a standard American English accent, causing some difficulty understanding Korean-accented English.
Like many other commenters, I agree with Sophia in that it is possible to become accustomed to certain accents and thus find it difficult to understand other speakers, even within the same language. Even in English, there is such a disparity in pronunciation (accents of Boston, Britain, Australia, etc.) that may at times make comprehension difficult. Usually I am able to piece together sentences even if I miss a word here or there, but I had the opportunity to travel to Scotland a few summers ago, and at times, the accents there were so different than what I was used to that it seems as if they spoke a different language. It is worth noting, though, that they didn’t seem to have nearly as much of a problem understanding me; the language barrier seemed to only go one way.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to Nicolas’s question about whether or not it is possible to have multiple accents for the same language, I definitely think it is. I grew up in LA, and most of what I say sounds like any other LA natives pronunciation would. Most of my family, however, lives in Canada, and there are occasional instances when people ask about my accent because some words come out sounding more similar to how my out-of-country relatives would say them than to how my peers would.
Griffin’s observation that she had more difficulty understanding the Scottish accent than many Scottish people had understanding her American accent is very interesting to me. It made me think about some conversations that I’ve had in the past, and about something somewhat related to what she mentioned. I spent some time living in Colombia, and when I would discuss different accents and pronunciations with my friends, I noticed that the non-native Spanish speakers among us (myself included) had less difficulty understanding Chilean and Puerto Rican accented Spanish than did the native Spanish-speakers (who had grown up speaking Colombian-accented Spanish). On the one hand, it seemed odd that, even though Spanish was their native language, many of the Colombians among us had a harder time understanding their own language with a different accent than did many of the non-native speakers; yet at the same time it seemed somewhat logical that the non-native speakers among us, who had studied Spanish in a more formal way and from a more removed perspective, and had made a concerted effort to expose ourselves to a variety of accents in Spanish, had less difficulty understanding different accents.
ReplyDeleteYet it was also interesting that the same trend didn’t seem to occur in English. Of my Colombian friends who had learned English as a second language, every single one of them had much less difficulty understanding American and Canadian accents than they did understanding the various Australian and British accents, and most of them couldn’t understand Scottish and Irish accents at all. Yet the native English speakers among us had much less trouble understanding these various accents.
Clearly this is all circumstantial and based on the individual experiences of a very small group of people, so I’m not trying to make any broad generalized assertion here. But to me it’s interesting that in one instance the native speakers seemed to have a harder time understanding variations on their own language than did non-native speakers, while in another instance the opposite was true.
I believe that comprehension of another's speech is highly contextualized to the point where we are able to surmise the meaning of a person's words or sentences based on what we know about their immediate surroundings. This, I feel, feeds into our ability to "translate" a person's dialect, accent or broken English into something our brain can process immediately as being comprehensible. If I am chatting someone at a party with a thick accent, my intellectual antennae will automatically assume the thrust of our conversation will in someway relate to the party. Therefore, if the person with whom I'm speaking says a word that I cannot comprehend completely, I can usually discern its meaning based on our locative context. This happened to me last month. I was attending a gathering at a friend's place and began chatting with a girl from China. Her English was not perfect, and quite a few words she spoke (and I'm sure this went both ways!) I could not understanding perfectly on their own. Yet, we had no difficulty understanding each other because the foundation of our discussion rested the party and then on Stanford and related issues. It's possible others use this same form of context to understand others where, when scrutinizing words and sentences on their own might be more difficult. To my mind, how we understand each other involves a sixth sense of sorts; one that incorporates our perception of localized context and how it frames possible avenues of discussion.
ReplyDeleteMost of what I have been reading through both the blog posts and comments have to do with the interactions we have between two distinct languages (ie. Spanish and English). I wanted to widen this question to encompass the concept of heteroglossia, the existence of different dialects within a singular language, such as English and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). A lot of what has been mentioned before, such as switching how you pronounce a word depending on context reminds me of code switching, a term used widely when talking about heteroglossia. Now, when it comes to these differences, I do not believe that everyone can come to understand one another completely due to societal constructs that have to do with language. Certain versions of English, for example, are pushed out of the classroom or workplace. For many, they might not hear it, thus making it hard and sometimes impossible to understand. I suppose you are immersed in it that might change but I wanted to hear all of your thoughts on those concepts: heteroglossia and code switching. Do you all believe we can treat the differences between English & Spanish the same as English & AAVE?
ReplyDeleteThat’s a really interesting question, one I don’t know that I can actually answer without admitting a little bit of ignorance. My first inclination upon reading the question was absolutely not because Spanish is a “real” language, rather than a compilation of slang. And then I had an “a-ha” moment. I was going about my argument the wrong way. I wanted to prove why AAVE isn’t actually a language, and use that to argue that the comparison between English’s relationships with AAVE and Spanish is senseless, but who’s to say that AAVE isn’t a real language? I don’t doubt anyone’s ability to name languages, or to identify parts necessary to form language, but I would challenge the average English speaker to definitively say they know where English began. I predict that the most accurate answer I’d receive would come through tracing back iterations of English; mapping changes in dialect from present to past. Finding any linguist who believes that the English language is complete and that we are on our final iteration would be nearly, if not entirely, impossible. So who are we to ignore the legitimacy of the heteroglossia evidenced in AAVE? Who can be sure that one day, albeit likely far off, AAVE will not have iterated past the point of comprehension by the average English speaker? Intuitively I find it unlikely, but entirely possible. So while I shy away from treating he difference between English and AAVE to the same extent that I do English and Spanish in the present, I think it is important to acknowledge the fact that one day we just might need to. Thoughts?
DeleteThis might be a somewhat tangential point, but I think that one of the contributing factors to mutual intelligibility is the fact that communication consists of much more than just spoken or signed language. Rather, communication consists of a combination of spoken or signed language, gestures, facial expressions, previous content/background, etc. Consider the following exercise for example: ask a friend to have a conversation with you but stipulate that both of you can only use nonsense or made up words, like “okiluto” or “pratel.” I imagine that in this conversation, while there will be little intelligible content, you likely will be able to get a sense of your conversation partner's emotion or feeling in the conversation and that the overall tone of the conversation will convey information about the seriousness and mood of the conversation. This is just to suggest that the meaning gleaned from a conversation consists of much more than just being able to understand any particular word, which might contribute to our ability to understand different dialects or accents. In other words, we are significantly aided by these additional features of communication in comprehending language.
ReplyDelete