Why People Understand Your Words but Still Miss Your Point
By Jay Alexander Poulton
When a new client tells me that people don’t understand them, they almost always assume their accent is to blame. Many have spent years worrying about how they pronounce “th” or whether their “r” sounds right, and they arrive expecting that we will spend our sessions correcting those sounds. What I usually hear in our first conversation points somewhere else. The sounds they worry about are rarely what makes them hard to follow. The bigger problem is almost always how they deliver their words, and in particular how fast they speak and how little time they give the listener to keep up.
This matters for you because it changes where you should put your effort. If you spend months polishing individual sounds while still racing through your sentences, your colleagues will keep asking you to repeat yourself. If you learn to finish your words and pause between ideas, you can become much easier to understand while keeping the accent you have.
Your accent and your clarity are measured differently
Speech researchers have studied this question for decades, and some of the most useful work comes from Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing. In a 1995 study, they separated what most people lump together as “accent” into distinct measurements. Accentedness describes how different your speech sounds from what the listener is used to hearing. Intelligibility describes how much of what you say the listener actually understands, which they tested by asking listeners to write down exactly what they heard. Comprehensibility describes how much effort the listener has to put in to understand you.
Their results surprised a lot of people. Many speakers whom listeners rated as having a strong accent were still transcribed with high accuracy, which means their words came through clearly. Accent was related to the other two measures, but only partly, and a strong accent on its own did not predict that a speaker would be misunderstood. Derwing and Munro found a similar pattern in a 1997 follow-up study that included speakers of Cantonese, Japanese, Polish and Spanish.
For a working professional, comprehensibility is the measure that matters most from day to day. Your colleagues may understand every word you say and still find it tiring to follow you. That fatigue is what leads to follow-up emails asking what you meant, and to the uncomfortable sense that your ideas are landing with less weight than they deserve.
What I actually hear when clients say “people don’t understand me”
In my coaching, the most common cause is speed combined with weak articulation. Clients speak quickly, run words into one another, and hurry over certain words so that their endings disappear. Sometimes this comes from nerves, and sometimes it comes from a habit of trying to get through a sentence before anyone interrupts. Either way, the listener receives a stream of sound with no clear edges, and they have to work hard to find where one idea ends and the next begins.
Compare these two versions of the same update. The first is how it often sounds when someone is rushing:
Harder to follow: “Sowe ran th’numbers’n basedonwhatwesaw wethink th’bestoption’s t’delay th’launch.”
Every word is technically there, but the listener has to reassemble the sentence while you are already moving on to the next one. Here is the same sentence delivered at a measured pace, with each word finished and a short pause between ideas (marked with a slash):
Easier to follow: “So, we ran the numbers. / Based on what we saw, / we think the best option / is to delay the launch.”
The words are identical, and the accent can be identical too. What changes is that the listener receives each idea as a complete unit, with a moment to absorb it before the next one arrives, and the most important word in the sentence, “delay,” has room to stand out.
Why a mispronounced “th” matters less than you think
This is why I am rarely concerned when a client pronounces “th” or “r” differently from a native speaker. Listeners are very good at using context to fill in a single unexpected sound, as long as the rest of the sentence reaches them clearly.
Imagine a client who says, calmly and at a steady pace, “We need to sink about the budget before Friday.” The “th” in “think” has become an “s,” but nobody in the meeting will be confused, because the sentence gives them everything they need to hear “think.” Now picture a speaker who pronounces every “th” perfectly but delivers the same sentence in a rapid blur, swallowing the ends of words. That speaker is far more likely to hear “Sorry, could you say that again?”
The research points in the same direction. In a 1998 study, Derwing, Munro and Wiebe compared learners who were taught to focus on individual sounds with learners who worked on broader features such as stress and speaking rate. When the learners spoke spontaneously, the way you do in a meeting, it was the group that had worked on the broader features whose comprehensibility improved. The benefits of individual-sound practice showed up mainly when learners were reading prepared sentences aloud.
A client who thought her accent was the problem
One client came to me convinced that her accent was holding her back. When we started talking, the first thing I noticed was her voice itself. She was pitching her voice high and pushing it out with so much force that in conversation it came across almost as shouting. Her listeners were reacting to that intensity before they had a chance to take in her words.
We worked on bringing her resonance down so that her voice sat lower and felt more settled. As her voice dropped, her cadence slowed and became more measured, and the tension went out of her voice. She became much easier to understand. Her accent turned out to be a much smaller factor than she had believed, because what was making her hard to follow was the way she was using her voice to deliver her words.
I share her story because it shows how easily the real problem gets misdiagnosed. She had assumed her accent was the barrier, and once we identified the actual cause, we had something specific and practical to work on.
How to find out what is really getting in your way
You can begin diagnosing this yourself. Record yourself explaining something from your work for about two minutes, the way you would in a meeting, and then listen back as though you were a colleague hearing it for the first time. Pay attention to places where words blur together or lose their endings, and to moments where you move from one idea to the next without pausing.
Then record the same explanation again, this time deliberately pausing at the end of each idea and finishing the final sound of every word. You do not need to drag every word out, since speaking unnaturally slowly can sound hesitant. Aim for the pace of someone who knows their point well and wants you to follow it, which tends to sound confident and considered.
If your voice feels tight or pushed when you speak at work, notice that as well. Tension in the voice tends to push people to speak faster, and in my client’s case, letting her voice settle lower slowed her pace without her having to force it.
When individual sounds do deserve attention
Pronunciation still matters in some situations. Certain differences change meaning in ways that context cannot rescue, particularly with words you use constantly in your field. A finance lead whose “fifteen” and “fifty” sound alike, for example, can cause real confusion in a budget discussion, and that is worth fixing. The order of the work matters, though. When your delivery is clear, the remaining sound issues become much easier to hear and correct, because they are no longer being swallowed by speed.
If colleagues regularly ask you to repeat yourself, it is worth finding out what is actually causing it before you decide your accent needs to change. In a consultation, I listen to how you speak in realistic work situations and tell you which habits are making you harder to follow, so that your practice time goes where it will make the biggest difference to how you are heard.
About the author
Jay Alexander Poulton is the founder of The Accent Coach and a trained ICF Executive Leadership Coach. He has nine years of coaching experience and more than 20 years in communications and marketing. Raised in multilingual Montréal, he has coached foreign-born professionals and executives at companies including Apple, Amazon, FedEx and Bank of America.
References
Derwing, T. M., & Munro, M. J. (1997). Accent, intelligibility, and comprehensibility: Evidence from four L1s. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19(1), 1-16.
Derwing, T. M., Munro, M. J., & Wiebe, G. (1998). Evidence in favor of a broad framework for pronunciation instruction. Language Learning, 48(3), 393-410.
Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M. (1995). Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. Language Learning, 45(1), 73-97.