How English speakers listen

- This course focuses on listener-friendly speech, but what does that mean? How could you make your speech listener-friendly? Before we discuss specific techniques, let's think first about how native English speakers listen. It's important to understand that if English speakers are your primary audience. To give you a sense of how they listen, I'm going to ask you to do a couple of exercises. I'm going to show you four blocks of color and I want you to say the colors out loud when you see them. So for example, you might see pink, blue, black, and yellow. All right. So get ready to say the colors that you see. Are you ready? Go. Good. Let's try it again. Ready? Go. Okay, now I'm going to show you words but I want you to say the colors of those words out loud. So again, you're focusing on the colors. Ready? Go. Good. Now let's do it again. Ready? Go. Great. Okay. Now, one last time, I promise. I'm going to show you the words again, you tell me only the colors that you see. Say this out loud. Ready and go. And once again, go. Now, these last two examples illustrate that you have to work a little bit harder to say the colors that you see just like when you're processing speech patterns that are different from yours. This test that you just took is called the Stroop test, and researcher Regina Kim shows that bilingual people do a better job at identifying the colors more quickly. The ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus only on the relevant aspects of the input is called inhibitory control. Bilingual people also often perform better than monolingual people at tasks that tap into inhibitory controllability. And her research suggests bilingual people are better at work-related conflict as well. Bilingual people are also better than monolingual people at switching between two tasks. For example, when bilinguals have to switch from categorizing objects by color, like red or green, to categorizing them by shape, circle or triangle, they do so more rapidly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when changing strategies, quickly and in the moment. All of this means that your primary audience, speakers of English, might have to work a little bit harder than you to listen and comprehend what others with accents are saying, especially if they're struggling to focus on the most relevant information. Let's see this in action. I'm going to give you an example sentence that is mostly intelligible and comprehensible, and then I'll tell you why. Here's the sentence: I looked everywhere. I looked in my office, in my house, I even looked inside my car, but I couldn't find my Fuzz Button anywhere. Now, you probably understood most of what I said. You knew that I had lost something because I repeated that I was looking several times. But you didn't know what I lost unless you knew what a Fuzz Button is. It's an electronic circuit. So maybe 95% of my speech was intelligible. Now this sentence, the way I spoke it, is also comprehensible because it doesn't take too much effort for the listener to understand, and it's intelligible because 95% of the information, in fact, the most relevant information was understood. I hope these exercises helped you to understand how native English speakers process spoken language and why our method to make the most relevant information stand out is important. We'll continue to discover more about how native English speakers listen in the next lesson.