Rate of speech in therapy across cultures

[Ceke2002]

I've been watching some staged psychotherapy sessions as part of various training videos and conferences, as well as listening to the Shrink Rap pod casts, and one thing I've noticed is that as an Australian speaker, until the conversation seems to begin flowing and the rate of speech becomes a lot quicker, it is exceedingly frustrating for me to listen to a lot of US voiced podcasts, lectures, acted out psychotherapy sessions and so on. Has anyone else experienced or dealt with that cross cultural shift where one cultures speech rate of English is faster or slower than the others, causing either confusion or frustration, and how do you view or deal with that? Just to clarify as well I'm not talking about pressure of speech, but just normal speech rates for a particular segment of English speaking culture or background.

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[birchswing]

I've always assumed when I can't understand an English dialect that it's due to pronunciation and not speed, but I could be wrong. Also in some dialects there are a lot of dropped sounds or words which perhaps make the language sound faster. For example, "Do you know what I am saying?" (8 syllables) vs. "Nom sain" (2-3 syllables). There are some British TV shows I need subtitles for. And even as an American, there some American dialects that are harder for me to understand.

 

[OldPsychDoc]

If I don't watch my fave BBC series with closed captioning, I find I'm missing half of the dialog for quite awhile until my brain adapts. It's like there's a filter that has to activate before my brain can say "Oh--THAT's what's going on here...". Similarly for pronounced South Asian and African accents.

 

[Ceke2002]

I've always assumed when I can't understand an English dialect that it's due to pronunciation and not speed, but I could be wrong. Also in some dialects there are a lot of dropped sounds or words which perhaps make the language sound faster. For example, "Do you know what I am saying?" (8 syllables) vs. "Nom sain" (2-3 syllables). There are some British TV shows I need subtitles for. And even as an American, there some American dialects that are harder for me to understand.

Dropped words or sounds is very Australian. I have quite a pronounced Adelaide accent (there are some regional differences between the accents, Adelaide's is probably the most noticeable) which a lot of people probably think of as the 'posh sounding accent', and I still drop words and sounds, although it does depend on who I'm addressing. When you're among friends you tend to drop words and sounds more than, say if you were in customer service at some upmarket bar. So yes Nomsain for 'Know what I'm saying', Skarnon for 'What is going on?' etc etc.

Edited to add: Just for interest's sake I'll try and break down how Australians manage to drop entire sounds and syllables, and still understand one another. Let's take 'What is going on', for example -- 'What is' becomes 'What's', which is then broken down to just the S sound at the end; 'Go-ing' becomes 'Garn', one syllable but when you pronounce it as a run on string of sounds it becomes more like 'Karn'; and 'On' remains as 'On' - so 'Skarnon' = 'What is going on'.

 

[Ceke2002]

If I don't watch my fave BBC series with closed captioning, I find I'm missing half of the dialog for quite awhile until my brain adapts. It's like there's a filter that has to activate before my brain can say "Oh--THAT's what's going on here...". Similarly for pronounced South Asian and African accents.

That is something I must admit I find somewhat perplexing, the difficulty people in the US seem to have with understanding other English accents besides their own. I mean I get if someone has English as their second language, and their accent is very heavy, but I've seen American documentary shows put subtitles up for people I can understand plain as day. I actually had to deal with a real life version of this when I decided to swap my domain and webspace provider (charity based website, I've let it lapse now and just gone to Facebook instead, much easier). I ended up having to ring an American call centre, and whilst I could understand the guy on the other end of the line with no problem at all, when it came to him understanding me he literally had to keep stopping me in the middle of every sentence and ask me to repeat and spell out words. Of course I wasn't impolite with him, but I do remember sitting there feeling rather exasperated and thinking to myself 'mate, I'm the speaking the Queen's English here, FFS!'.

So if you have a patient in this sort of situation, how do you deal with it? Do you try and mirror their rate of speech (slower or faster), do you ask them to repeat things a lot at the risk of annoyance from the patient? Do you prepare ahead of time? I mean obviously I assumed if a patient comes in with legitimate pressure of speech that you don't start mirroring them, but I wondered if it was something that happened with other rates of speech.

 

[birchswing]

That is something I must admit I find somewhat perplexing, the difficulty people in the US seem to have with understanding other English accents besides their own. I mean I get if someone has English as their second language, and their accent is very heavy, but I've seen American documentary shows put subtitles up for people I can understand plain as day. I actually had to deal with a real life version of this when I decided to swap my domain and webspace provider (charity based website, I've let it lapse now and just gone to Facebook instead, much easier). I ended up having to ring an American call centre, and whilst I could understand the guy on the other end of the line with no problem at all, when it came to him understanding me he literally had to keep stopping me in the middle of every sentence and ask me to repeat and spell out words. Of course I wasn't impolite with him, but I do remember sitting there feeling rather exasperated and thinking to myself 'mate, I'm the speaking the Queen's English here, FFS!'.

So if you have a patient in this sort of situation, how do you deal with it? Do you try and mirror their rate of speech (slower or faster), do you ask them to repeat things a lot at the risk of annoyance from the patient? Do you prepare ahead of time? I mean obviously I assumed if a patient comes in with legitimate pressure of speech that you don't start mirroring them, but I wondered if it was something that happened with other rates of speech.

While I still am not sure if I have ever encountered unusually fast or slow speech, there definitely are times you have to ask people to repeat themselves. I suppose if a psychiatrist were going to certain region outside their own, say Louisiana where there's a Creole influence, this would be more common. But in the US a good number of doctors, particularly psychiatrists in my experience, are foreign born so that the situation is more the opposite of what you imagine. It can be an impediment in my opinion, not because of any extra time it would take to gain understanding, but because of not attaining complete understanding. I tried a psychiatrist recently who had a bit of difficulty with English. I found him to be slow to understand things and he was nodding quite a bit when I was explaining some of my odder OCD habits. I don't think he really understood what I was saying (I know in one case he didn't). That along with not being terribly well versed in benzo withrawal led me to stick with my current psychiatrist. So, it does play a role. There's a child psychiatrist in town (the only child psychiatrist actually) that people tend not to like too much as he does checklists (with an actual checklist) at each appointment. He has a very heavy Spanish accent and I've been told it's hard to understand him. I think the checklist is a bit of a crutch in that case (I've only heard this second hand). At least where I live, native English speaking psychiatrists are very rare. It's very generational. There were some American psychiatrists, but the two who were in town are now retired. All of the younger ones are foreign born. Granted, I'm in a fairly small town.