Paraverbal Communication

Image above retrieved from Windle, R., & Warren, S. (n.d.)

The way that you speak says a lot about you. This includes your accent, the cadence in your voice, how loud you are, how slow or fast you say something and even how you enunciate your words. We can even be attracted or turned off by a voice because how you say something matters just as much, if not more, than what you’re saying (Eaton, C., (2018)).

In Drakes case, he had an interview with the tonight show (2016) where he’s talking about how his dad said that he hasn’t gotten around to listen to his album “Views” yet. In this, he talks about how he fluctuates with the way he speaks because he gets some of his words and phrases from his dad and the others from his mom. The audience gets pretty riled up when Drake starts speaking in an accent to mimic his dad, particularly how his dad tries to play it off that he listened to his sons’ album when he actually didn’t. In the video below, you can clearly see how the infliction in Drakes voices changes as he impersonates his dad when he’s lying, especially when he says “Drake, man”.

In the book Paraverbal Communication in Psychotherapy by Donovan and colleagues (2017) they say that paraverbal communication can help tremendously in therapy. This is because the more that you pay attention to how a client reacts to you, you can discover things about your own techniques and adapt them to fit that particular client. They even go as far as to say that you can use paraverbal communication to train other practitioners so that you are just generally able to help people better.

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