Listen in and discover how the way we speak shapes our place in the world, and why becoming a better communicator starts with becoming a better listener.
How Humans Talk is an SBS Audio podcast produced by Onomato People and SBS Audio. Follow on the SBS Audio App, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Listnr,
Credits:
Host: Rune Pedersen joined by Stefan Delatovic
Producers: Rune Pedersen, Stefan Delatovic
Writers: Rune Pedersen and Stefan Delatovic
Artwork: Wendy Tang
Post production and sound design: Dom Evans and James Coster at EARSAY
SBS Audio team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford, Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Guests: Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez, Dory Wang
Transcript:
Stefan: How humans talk is an SBS podcast recorded on Wurundjeri country. We pay our respects to the custodians of this land, which has been shaped by stories and language and love for generations.
Rune: [Inaudible sounds from moving mouth]
Rune: What's up man?
Stefan: I'm good. Doing good. Pretty confused at what I'm witnessing. Uh, what are you doing over there?
Rune: Like, have you ever wondered like how humans talk?
Stefan: Like physically, like how the flapping of the lips makes the noise happen?
Rune: Yeah, but I mean like, it's more than that. Like just. I don't know, like, you know, I had a baby and it just makes you think about things.
Stefan: Yeah, I, I can relate to that.
Rune: Like how do we talk, [00:01:00] what I mean is like language, when you think about it, it's kind of a superpower. You and I, we do it for our jobs, but when you think about it, like everyone does it for their jobs, for something, we spend so much time on it, we are not that great at it, and I think we could just give it more attention.
Stefan: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I remember when I was a kid, I used to think advertising was really silly because like why would I buy something just because someone told me about it the right way. But now as a grownup, I do marketing as part of my job. So yeah, there is this magic to this stuff that is really hard to quantify.
Rune: So when you work in it and spend all your time on thinking about strategies and messages and things. It gets even harder to remember that talking is just really a beautiful, imperfect thing, but it's full of power. Like the thing I can say at any given time can really like have an impact on you. I can say like the worst, there's [00:02:00]
Stefan: no need to, we can just keep moving. Okay.
Rune: Or I can say like the best things and will have an impact on you as well, right? Yes. You know what we should do? Do a new podcast?
Stefan: Yeah. I can explore different cultures and learn all their communication secrets and we can share them with the audience so they can learn how to turn everybody's unique differences into strengths.
Rune: And like a wise old Buddha and ancient Buddha, I can return with more communication superpowers than ever.
Stefan: Okay, great. Love that. Step one, I think you should speak to a speech pathologist. What?
Rune: Meet Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez, executive communication consultant, speech pathologist, and singer.
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: I'm obsessed with sound and as part of that I help academics. Experts and entrepreneurs sound interesting and credible, and I also sing opera.
Rune: You've been spending your life exploring voice and communication. What makes human communication so powerful and why do we do it the way we do it?
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: I think because we're social mammals, we. Need to find ways to survive within the hierarchy and the group. And although we live in a world where there's an emphasis on equity and ease of access, it isn't actually the case. There are hierarchies and rules and codes that we need to follow in the group norm. And so as a result, the way we interact with the individuals around us in the group. Is delivered through our communication, which expresses our identity, and as such, it's essential to our survival to have the capacity to communicate in some way, to survive within the group, to not be excluded from the group and to interact with what's going on around us.
Rune: Do you think that we undervalue our voice and its power in everyday life?
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: I think we do. 'cause when we communicate, it's a bit like having a multi tool, so a multi key tool that we could build lots of different furniture items with or unlock doors with or open jars with. But we just rely on the one thing I. And we overlook the fact that we've got a whole Swiss Army knife of skills and tactics and ability levels that we could incorporate in how we face our contacts and conversation partners. And we just rely on what we say and when we are going to speak next. And we overlook the multidimensional nature of communication.
I think the reason why it's so hard, Rune is that we, we forget that it's. Involving multiple intelligences. So to use our voice, it's a fine motor skill to find the words. It's a executive function skill. We have to have memory to access them. We have to think clearly to find them, to get us good sound out.
That's strong enough and audible. We need to use our respiratory function. So we've got motor skills involved. We also have psychosocial skills where we need to. Self-regulate if someone offends us or oversteps our boundaries. So we're processing very heavy information and having to come up with a nuance, precise, or respectful message in the heat of the moment.
And because it's multi-dimensional and it involves all our capacity, it needs practice. But because it's a default, we need it as a default and as a survival mechanism. It's going to happen anyway no matter the. Skill level and our success at doing it because we just do it by default anyway.
Rune: So for someone like myself or anyone listening who's just using this by default, what's the opportunity for sort of looking closer at the Swiss Army knife and unfolding it? What's the potential?
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: I think we can create deeper, stronger, and more meaningful synapses of the people around us.
Rune: What's the biggest misconception people have about their own voice?
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: That they can't change it, that they're born with a certain sound and it's fixed, and that's just how they sound. I. We can change it immensely.
We can play with various ways the voice vibrates. We can adjust our picture voice if we want to. I used to work extensively in gender transition training with the voice at a clinic where I would essentially position a voice within social norms of what's. Sounds female comparative to male, so I could absolutely assist a client to build their voice to align with their gender identity, and it's absolutely possible because the voice is a signaling tool.
It's a very malleable device, but with that in mind, because it's very much an engineered structure, if you look at it, it's a machine in its structure and form and function. You can definitely. Work with a machine and optimize it to work more efficiently, especially because the machine is built on three components.
It's built on a principle based on physics theories around the power, the source, and the filter. So the airstream is the power for the sound that drives the vibration of the source. Your vocal folds or chords in your neck, they emit a sound wave. That sounds nothing like the human voice. It sounds like farts actually.
And then the way it moves through the. Excuse me, but it does the way, the way it moves through the back of the throat and into the cavities and tissues of the mouth and the nasal passageways. It's what creates this very human-like element and the way we play with the pressure and adjust the airstream through the valve in the muscle.
Mm-hmm. Into the mouth will determine how efficiently we get it into the room, which is where we need it to be. It needs to be in the room rather than caught it in the back of the throat like that. Mm-hmm. So we are playing very much with principles of physics. It's very concrete. And for that reason, we can actually optimize if we follow physics laws.
Rune: It's funny you say that. I might not be offensive now, but I've noticed in Australia that we speak quite back. Uh, in, in, in our throat, in the mouth, in a way. Like, eh, like, am I right about that? You
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: are correct. Yes. This is called vocal fry, but in many cases it's also vocal strain. It can sound the same. So that croaky quality that we kind of get in the sound like that is the product of one of two things, either low airstream pressure, which is also called popcorn resonance.
So it sounds like this. Ah. So that's what happens if you use very low pressure, and that can creep into the end of sentences, especially in Australian speech patterns, but it can happen across the entire sentence that aligns with research into decreased credibility. Although in Australia it's subtly different because that's where the norm speaks.
Technically, if you looked at norms for vocal clarity and acoustic, the Australian norm is what other language groups and dialects of English would classify as impaired vocal function. So the norms for an Australian speaker, I can get a lot higher patterns of fry, and we call it noise to harmonics. So distortion in the sound at the vocal level, comparative to an American general Midwestern accent, and yet I wouldn't be given.
A clinical diagnosis at the acoustic level that my sound isn't working because I'm using an Australian accent, where if I had the same vocal quality and a clinician in America did the test and I'm American, I would be sent off straight away for voice. Therapy.
Rune: Really?
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: That's correct. Yeah.
Rune: Wow. Okay.
Stefan (skit): Oh, come on mate.
Stefan (skit): Vocally impaired. That is a crook thing to say. Fair dinkum. Oh, I can speak plenty. Good. You know, if you reckon you could do better, you got Buckley's Chance, you drunko.
Rune: Do you work with people or see people that sort of quote unquote suffers under this, that they have a strong accent?
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: 13 years ago, I started a clinic to assist international speakers of English with their approach to the local pronunciation variant, Australian English. I had no intent to make Australian sounds among this client base.
I really just wanted to provide my clients with the ability to feel confident and comfortable to express themselves and then assist them with any of the sound factors that were impairing their ability to transfer their message clearly. So I do a lot of detailed assessments of the sound profile of speakers, and identify through an advocacy based approach.
If we target sounds to suit a certain audience under the provision that no accent is superior to another nor National Creed. What would we work on? So it's very delicate.
Rune: Mm-hmm.
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: And I would constantly get the response, and I've seen this across the past decade plus, but I just wanna get an Aussie accent because I'm sick of being asked where I'm from.
I'm sick of being told I have a strong accent, which to anyone in phonetics or sound or languages is a myth. The notion that someone has a strong accent is implied by the difference between the listener. What the listener brings to the sound perception. So when the speaker delivers their message in their new language or a language that's maybe dual dominance, their processing demands are higher.
They have to think a lot harder to create their message. They're activating their brain more, and that's why we see higher IQ scores usually in bilinguals, typically. And also higher emotional intelligence scores because they have to do a lot more socially in the conversation than the speaker in their mother tongue.
Now, let's consider the listener's brain and processing. We have what's called, it's a really unfortunate term, but in research it's called the Vampire Effect versus the Halo effect. So the listener is listening to the message, and if they're not culturally informed, or even if they are well cultured and they have that knowledge that sounds are different across languages and maybe they lived abroad, their brain still has to process harder.
They're still having to process the sounds of the speaker that are different to what they're calibrated to perceiving. But this is the kicker. We know that after five minutes, the listener's brain starts to cope and adapt.
Rune: Mm-hmm.
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: The listeners of the second language speaker need to take time, give our brain time to process, let the vampire effect do its time for five minutes.
Make more effort to speak with someone who probably has a lot of ideas given that they're bilingual or multilingual. We know their brains are more often than not more socially intelligent. Listen, listen and respect
Rune: when it comes to sound and vibrations. I am curious, are there any that are better received or more well-liked?
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: So we know from research that voices that are vocally expressive rather than monotone across most languages spoken are more likely to be perceived as attractive, vocally attractive, and more likely to be seen as competent and interesting and meaningful to listen to. We also know that voices that are vocally clear rather than croaky are valued as more credible.
So we want to get clarity of tone, essentially with sufficient vocal expression, not too little and not too much, because if it's too vocally expressive, particularly within the corporate sense, the speech patterns will be perceived as neurotic. So having just the right balance, monotone is not going to work effectively.
Rune: So it doesn't work if I talk like this and keep it on that level.
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: That's correct.
Rune: But instead, I should try and go in different, different ways. But now I'm gonna sound neurotic. That's right. Unbalanced,
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: yeah. Yeah. The unbalanced value there. And the other thing we should consider is the rhythmical flow of the language.
So the voice is vibrating. Per second. And those vibrations fall on syllables, which we can mark up. So if we have the word elephant, elephant, we can make the syllables even elephant. So many speakers think they're monotone when they're actually monosyllabic. Mm.
Rune: Okay.
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: And I constantly, we meet clients Yeah. Who are monosyllabic rather than monotone. And that requires a certain approach to the way the words move through the mouth with fluidity. Yeah. Okay.
It's kind of a musical knowledge in a sense, but also, uh, something we hear in poetry, in well-spoken prose, and this comes under the category typically of elocution.
We see beginning emergences of these notions of persuasive speech patterns through the work of Cicero, for example, in Ancient Rome.
Rune: So is there any difference between talking and singing, or is singing really just a, sort of a more rhythmic way of talking?
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: Singing is much more exciting in my opinion, and always more rewarding than talking because of its access to a broader sound palette and different timing.
So when we speak. The main comparisons between singing and speech is that we're speaking on syllables just as we sing on syllables, but singing has kind of slowed down speech with increased palette of colors.
Rune: Great. Yeah, I, I'm imagining I. You sort of going through life and hearing all these sounds and living in half a musical,
Dr Sarah Lobegeiger de Rodriguez: it's not far from the truth. Rune
Rune: Sarah made me realize just how powerful our voices are, but I wanted to hear from someone who's living this experience every day. Working as a communication professional in their second language. Meet Dory Wang.
Dory Wang: Hi, my name is Dory. I'm a language lover, a language learner, and currently content producer for SBS Learn English, A language service that helps Australian adult migrant to learn English for everyday life.
I was a TV presenter and a TV producer in China. Then I think I moved to Australia. Then I quickly just learned, oh, talking, you know, in Australia, English is very different. And, um, to be honest, at the starting point, I didn't think, it just, I, I didn't trust myself can find a way to back to media industry again because it was so hard.
Dory Wang: Can you imagine when I just, you know, came to Australia, the only English I know was seven vegetable names, broccoli, cauliflower, onion, spring onion, tomato, [00:18:00] potato. That's all I know. And of course, you know, and a basic conversation of how are you, I'm. Fine. And some English I learned in Chi, you know, in Chinese textbook.
Rune: What's the hardest part of suddenly communicating professionally in another language?
Dory Wang: I think the hardest part is I can't communicate professionally. Um, or I guess in another way, I would say the way I communicate really doesn't represent the professional level that I am. Like for example, before I came to Australia, I have.
10 years experience working in media industry, but suddenly, you know, when I came to Australia, I still carry that experience, right? 'cause that's not gonna go anywhere. And I managed so many big projects. But the way I speak, just, you know, didn't represent what I did before, right? 'cause I could only use very, very simple sentence, simple vocabulary.
I can't express out, although I know I'm experienced, I know everything about this production process, but I can't communicate professionally. And that really, really makes me angry for a long time.
I'm a very outgoing person. I use a lot of like other ways, you know, to compliment the way I can express that clearly. Like use a lot of body gestures. Yeah. Then draw people some graphs [00:19:30] or Yeah, just doing a good preparation before I really, you know, start professional conversation with someone else.
Rune: So how did people react to your accent? Mm-hmm. And did that affect your confidence?
Dory Wang: Oh, I think that's a good question. And, uh. I have to say I'm very lucky because to be honest, I never had experience where people really judged my accent. I think what makes me uncomfortable or you know, not that confident is my, my myself, I. I, I used to hate my Chinese accent and I tried many, many way to, to hide that accent.
Yeah, I think that comes to the bias, right? Because I'm a Mandarin speaker and in Mandarin, I. We have a standard, you know, measurement, very strict measurement to test your speaking, the accuracy of your speaking, how you pronounce those, you know, four tone, right? Ah, ah, ah. And as a TV presenter, we all need to pass that test to be able to be a property presenter.
So, growing up, you know, as a Mandarin speaker, I always know, okay, there's only one accent. One standard accent for Mandarin and, uh, because in China everyone learned English, right? And during my generation, a very common [00:21:00] slogan. For every English learner was I translate that to English. I can see you're just
Rune: little confused. Eyes
Dory Wang: translate to English. It means learn standard, authentic. Correct English. So I just, you know, I always have this, you know, mind. Okay, what is correct, authentic standard English. And to my understanding how you speak, like news reporters speak, that should be the correct way.
Dory Wang: Hmm.
Dory Wang: Yeah. And if you never be able to achieve that, that means your English is not good. But it's not. 'cause people don't really, you know. Accent don't really, you know, impact how other perceive us. It's really the tone. Right? Like, I remember 'cause I was a Mandarin speaker, I, I am a Mandarin speaker, see grammar mistakes while speaking Mandarin, my pitch will be much higher.
Like for example, if I'm just, you say hello to you in man can, right?
Rune: Yeah.
Dory Wang: So when I just, you know, switch to. English right now because I'm aware of it. So I'm consciously low my tone because I know for listeners right, the high speech will become a problem. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And that will affect how people see me or you know, giving people not that pleasant. I think listening experience.
Dory Wang: I'm aware of that. Yeah.
Rune: How has this experience. Change the way you think about communication and belonging.
Dory Wang: I love this question because I was a trained TV presenter and the TV presenter, you, you need to fill in all the communication gap, right? You can't like let the silence happen on tv. Yeah. So I guess my training experience.
Help me to develop, you know, the capability to speak even without thinking. I can speak, I can talk, I can fill in the communication gap even. I don't know what's going on. I just feel like I speak quicker than my think. But when I came to, you know, here, because I don't have that language proficiency, right?
I guess I need to think first. That helps me to become a better listener because you know, when I was a TV presenter, right? Everything's about me talk. I'm under the spot. Like everyone listen to me. So I didn't thought, you know, I really listened to others that much. But here I feel okay if I really want to say something nicely or something.
That's meaningful. I really need to slow down and listen carefully.
Rune: Yeah, that's such a good point. So I guess to become a better speaker, it just starts by listening.
Rune: How Humans Talk is produced and written by Stephen Delatovic and by me Rune Pedersen from Onomato People. Post-production and sound design for the series was done by Dom Evans and James Coster at EARSAY. The SBS team is Joel Supple and Max Gosford, and our artwork is by Wendy Tang. Follow and review us wherever you found this podcast.
