Making Sense of Accents - Report by Mei Lee, Speech and Language Therapist
Many years ago I was confronted with this very dilemma by a Consultant who referred his registrar to me, because 'he may not pass his exams if no one can understand him'. The registrar, from Ghana, was intelligible. It was soon established that he was naturally extremely anxious about his career prospects and his accent. It also transpired that although I was not an elocutionist, I, as his hospital speech therapist, was viewed by himself and his Consultant as his final hope. When asked what he would like to achieve, thge registrar's heartfelt answer was 'I want to speak like you so that I can pass my exams'. No pressure then! Together we calibrated his desires to more realistic and functional goals, which were to a) restore confidence, b) improve clarity, c) work on certain vowel sounds and specific words which his Consultant found hard to diambiguate, including medical jargon. Time was also spent reassuringhim that he had a perfectly pleasant voice and acceptable accent, and was indeed an articulate professional.
Edda Sharpe's workshop would then have been a Godsend - but better late than never! Speech and Language Therapists who specialise in Voice focus on rehabilitating imparied voices to vocal health and optimal, effort-free use. We are rarely asked to attend to the colouration, musicality, inflection, pace and rhythm of voices, and when we are, it is usually in the case of neurological diseases such as Parkinson's where the voice becomes monotonous, flat and slow. In this case, rhythm and pace are utilised together with exercises to improve volume and stamina, to get the voice to more closely approximate what it used to be, rather than elite vocal gymnastics enabling the convincing approximation of another accent.
Edda used escellent voice clip samples to illustrate how different accents (Polish, Indian, Iraqi, Oriental (Vietnamese? Thai?) varied in pace, rhythm, pitch, inflection, and how if these variables were applied to an English voice they might provoke quite unexpected reactions. Accents can be a clash of cultures, leading to erroneous impressions with unfortunate consequences. A heightened sensitivity and awareness of this, and the ability to train one's ear to pick up these cues, is an extremely valuable aural tool in the SLT tool-kit.
I was also impressed by how Edda managed to get 40 non-mandarin speakers in 20 minutes to recreate passable impressions of mandarin clusters, consonants and tonal vowels. This is no mean feat, as the wrong tone used can lead to cultural implosions. Edda heightened awareness of patterns and muscle memory, and how in our phonemic paradigms we have inherent shapings and tensions in each of our tongues which become habitual, forming the pattern of our 'mother tongues'., We had great fun switching from comedy Indian (post-alveolar curled tongue-tip) to comedy Frence (pursed lips and retroflex 'rr', forward tongue-tip), grossly exaggerated to make useful points. By adjusting tongue settings, we tune into the musicality of individual languages and therefore the accents of their native speakers. Other areas touched on were Voice & Rapport, and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), as well as the empathetic, persuasive voice where we mirror each other's inflections (demonstrated via communication by babble - another cause for much hilarity).
This workshop left me inspired and fizzing and certainly thinking out of my SLT Box! It is a pity that degree courses in Speech and Language Training do not include even one session on accent work. It would certainly make phonetics lessions less dry, more lively, and finally at dinner parties we might be able to answer 'Yes! Yes! Yes!' to the usual question 'You're a speech therapist? You can make me speak better?!!'