Why people mumble

It takes some practice, but this simple exercise will help your muscles get into gear and work a little harder for you. Put the knuckle of your thumb in your mouth and bite down gently.

Then, using any reading material you have, read out loud and speak as clearly as you can. Do this for at least a minute a day and notice straight away after doing it how clear you sound. Team this up with improving your vocal charisma and your speech will be much clearer and more engaging. Set your eyes on whatever is three metres in front of you right now. You can practice in your bedroom, and you'll find that just by sending your intention a little further, you'll crisp up those sounds in no time.

The listener may ask for a repetition of the mumbled portion, but may also interpret the garbled words in a more positive way. Others may choose to mumble because they want to express a personal opinion without being completely offensive.

They may speak clearly at first to communicate an official response, but then mumble a softer reply under their breath. Because a mumble is so unintelligible, the listener may have no idea the speaker is actually muttering an epithet or sarcastic response.

Some incidents of mumbling may indicate a speech impediment or a lack of self-confidence by the speaker. The speaker may have every intention of speaking clearly, but the words get swallowed up or garbled in his or her mouth before delivery.

Languages with minimalist color vocabularies tend to be spoken in pre-industrial societies, where there are very few manufactured objects to which color has been artificially applied. This means that speakers mostly refer to natural objects, for which color is highly predictable, just as gender has traditionally been for nurses or police officers. If you think back to the last time you asked someone to go out and cut the green grass or buy you some yellow bananas, it becomes easier to see how a language might get by without an abundant menu of color words—especially in an area without a profusion of consumer products.

While there are many reasons to believe language involves a great deal of data compression without catastrophic loss of meaning, scientists still know very little about how speakers figure out exactly what information they can afford to leave out and when. The data-compression algorithms used to create MP3 files are based on scores of psychoacoustic experiments that probed the fine points of human auditory perception. Do speakers have implicit theories about what information is most essential to their listeners?

If so, what do these theories look like, and how do speakers arrive at them? And what to make of the fact that people do sometimes mumble unintelligibly, throwing out either too much information or the wrong kind? Accurately predicting the information that a listener can easily recover sometimes requires knowing a lot about his previous experience or knowledge.

If you are struggling to hear, but not in dire need of a hearing aid, you might want to look at our list of the best personal sound amplification products to help give your hearing a small boost.

This is because, rather than visualizing hearing loss like a slider scale, it should instead look like a sort of matrix. Some people experiencing hearing loss will lose the ability to hear certain sounds , where another group will only be able to hear those sounds. The big misconception is that hearing loss simply makes everything sound quieter. As hearing declines, so does our ability to discriminate speech, and that takes the form of certain letters and sounds being harder to hear.

The earlier stages of hearing loss can be the least noticeable, and yet the most frustrating. You might be able to hear most sounds, but miss sounds of a higher frequency like s, f, sh, or th sounds.

This can make sentences sound choppy and disjointed, distracting you from what is being said. That is because these high frequency sounds are a large part of speech. High-frequency hearing loss is the most common form of hearing loss associated with age and frequent exposure to loud noise. Hearing loss aside, it has also been found that the ability to discern speech can falter with age. This has less to do with the ears, and more to do with the brain. As people age, they are less able to parse meaning within a sentence.