Does your pig go 'knor'? Medical students' skills in using animal sounds as a cross-cultural paediatric engagement tool.

Abstract

The development of verbal communication skills is an important aspect of medical education asaccurate assessment in part relies on effectively obtaining information from patients. When assessing children of different cultural or ethnic backgrounds, young medics may find effective verbal communication difficult because they lack understanding about what children are really like. Animal noises are a likely tool with which to successfully engage with young children. However, these differ by culture and it is unclear whether young New Zealand medical students will be adept at effectively engaging and communicating with foreign children via this mode of communication. We therefore assessed whether medical students in our country were able to accurately reproduce animal noises from different cultures. Six current medical students from New Zealand (with English as their first language) were assessed on their ability to reproduce animal noises from three different foreign languages: Dutch, Arabic and Danish. The animals selected were duck, cow, dog, frog, pig and sheep. Students were played recordings of the foreign-language animal noises, and were then rated on a scale of 1-5 (1=poor, 5=outstanding) on their ability to reproduce the noise. Arabic animal noises were reproduced more convincingly than those in the other languages (mean score: 3.8), of which animal noises in Danish were worst (mean score: 3.1). Perhaps unsurprisingly, sheep noises were reproduced best (mean score: 4.7), whereas pig noises were the least convincing (mean score: 2.2). Findings indicate that New Zealand medical students are likely to be better than average at reproducing animal noises in the languages examined, and are perhaps socially and genetically predisposed to replicating sheep noises successfully. They are therefore likely to make good paediatric registrars and fabulous au pairs. The study highlights the more serious issues of multicultural understanding and tolerance of other cultures, and provides a novel paediatric engagement tool for those young medics who do not really 'get' children.