With a trilingual Brazilian mother and a quintlingual Lebanese father, I am proud and a little awed at my parents’ language skills. Even with their extensive linguistic knowledge, I noticed how my otherwise successful parents would struggle to communicate in certain conversational contexts due to their accents. One of the most obnoxious of these situations was contacting a dreaded call center. My mother's eyebrows would furrow as the native English speaker on the other line asked her to repeat her complaint for the fourth time. Her voice would get louder and her r's would become exaggeratedly American as if to compensate, yet she’d still leave the conversation frustrated and confused at the communication breakdown.
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Reflecting on my parents’ experiences made me realize that I could use the analytical skills honed from my Masters degree and work as a Speech-Language Pathologist to help other professionals become more clear and confident in their communication proficiency. Studying speech components such as rate, intonation, resonance, phonemes, and vowel length through accent coaching can help anyone improve their speech clarity both at work and with friends.