Valerie Fridland

speaker

155 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 30 Mar

Valerie Fridland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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All Ears English Podcast · AEE 2590: 3 Tips to Keep Your Accent and Be Understood With Valerie Fridland · 30 Mar 2026 podcast

All right, so the third tip is a little more, you know, what can we do about these things?

So if we are worried about intelligibility, there are things that researchers have found really,

really, really inhibit intelligibility more than others.

Now, one is pronunciation, of course, and I think we're all aware about that.

But the other, which is often given short shrift in sort of the learning of a new language, is the prosodic patterns of that new language, which let me break down what that means because it's a big word.

Linguists call it prosody, but I think

Everyday people, people that have friends would call it stress and intonation patterns.

So stress is the sort of emphasis that you put on, meaning it's more louder and more intense on certain syllables of words, which is sort of something that native speakers know already about their language when they learn it.

Or stress.

As you're saying a sentence, the stress pattern can be word stress, which often means that a native speaker is trying to highlight the focus of that sentence or what that sentence is about.

So that's the stress pattern.

So you have syllable stress and word stress.

Now, intonation is the pattern over an entire sentence that gives a feeling to a listener of word.

what that speaker's intending with that sentence.

So it could be that I'm making a statement, so you have falling pitch, a falling intonation pattern, or I'm asking a question, so you have a rising intonation pattern, or it can be also the form of rising intonation pattern that is called uptalk, which simply means I'm still moving on, I'm gonna continue, I'm not done with my turn.

So there's a lot of information in that.

And what's really interesting is while we do really focus on pronunciation, and that is important to do,

The stress and intonation has been found to be as important as pronunciation in intelligibility, but even more, what it seems to really contribute to is the sense of cultural proficiency that a listener gets from hearing a speaker.

So even if you have a very heavy accent, but you have some more native-like understanding of how the stress and intonation patterns work, and you are able to use those

Your heavy accent doesn't really make people think you're not very culturally proficient because you have the stress and intonation patterns down.

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