Is picking up an accent more of a choice than we may think?

By Stephen Beech

People have a “high degree” of control over the accent they speak in, suggests new research.

Social rules and expectations influence how much we sound like the people around us, according to the study.

Scientists explained that imitating the accents of characters in a TV show is fairly common.

But while it’s a common belief that picking up someone else’s accent just happens automatically, the new study suggests that people actually have “considerable” control over when they adopt or suppress someone else’s accent.

For the study, 136 American English speakers listened to recordings of an Australian speaker and were instructed to either imitate her, avoid imitating her or simply repeat the words they’d just heard.

The findings, published in the journal Laboratory Phonology, showed that participants had a “high degree” of control over accent imitation.

The research team also found that participants’ level of awareness of certain distinct accent features, such as vowel pronunciation in words like bath and trap, played a strong role in which sounds were imitated.

Study lead author Kathryn Campbell-Kibler said: “People are pretty good at controlling whether they sound like somebody, if you ask them to, but accent features that they find socially meaningful and notable will interfere with that.

“Basically, if we don’t tell you whether or not to imitate somebody, you’re going to sound like them on the bits that you notice or think are interesting.”

The recorded audio used in the study featured the voice of a college-educated white Australian woman in her 20s from Perth, Australia.

When asked by the researchers to imitate the Australian speaker’s accent, the participants easily did so, and when they were told not to imitate the accent, they maintained their normal speech patterns.

Without explicit instructions, participants tended to imitate only a single feature, such as dropping the “r” sound in near.

That could be due to an automatic reflex, language play or a combination of the two, according to the research team.

The study also revealed a clash between what our brains expect to hear and what our ears hear in real time.

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While participants initially copied the Australian vowel sound in words like trap, they gradually stopped when the speaker also used broad, distinct Australian vowels in words like bath.

They had already built-up expectations of what the speaker’s accent should sound like, and when the recording they heard strayed from those expectations, the participants stopped imitating that particular sound.

Campbell-Kibler, of Ohio State University, said: “We got this kind of overarching effect: What you think she usually sounds like ends up clobbering the token that you just heard.”

Her goal going into the study, conducted in Ohio State’s Language Sciences Research lab, was to learn more about how our minds process language.

She was particularly interested in how the perception side — when you’ve just heard somebody speak — influences what speech you produce.

The process of accent acquisition has long fascinated, and confounded, linguists.

Campbell-Kibler said: “How come we don’t always pick up everybody’s accent?

“This is actually a huge question mark.

“Your spouse, for example, could have a completely different accent than you, and while you might pick up some features of how they sound, you probably won’t end up sounding exactly like each other, even over the course of decades.

“Or maybe the Southern drawl you had as a child is most pronounced only when you talk to your family.

“People who move to a new area often end up with an accent that’s somewhere in the middle between where they came from and where they live now.”

But the research team didn’t note any hesitation among participants when it came to imitating the Australian speaker’s accent.

Study co-author Cynthia Clopper, a professor of linguistics at Ohio State, said: “The model talker spoke a dialect that was likely to be in high regard for the participants, allowing us to examine the imitation of different dialect features in a prestigious variety.”

Campbell-Kibler added: “In other words, the speaker was considered to be a member of a positively valued group for most Americans.

“You don’t feel like you’re making fun of somebody in the same way that you might if it was a stigmatized group.”

Campbell-Kibler plans to further explore the mechanics of automatic imitation and deliberate language play, which she believes could lead to a clearer understanding of how the mind processes speech.