This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Have you ever binge-watched Bluey or a British crime drama and caught yourself imitating the characters' accents out loud? Rest assured, you are not alone.
While it's a common belief that picking up someone else's accent just happens automatically, new research from The Ohio State University suggests that people actually have considerable control over when they adopt or suppress someone else's accent. In a study published recently in Laboratory Phonology, 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 researchers found that participants had a high degree of control over accent imitation.
They also found that participants' level of awareness of certain distinct accent features, like vowel pronunciation in words like bath and trap, played a strong role in which sounds were imitated. "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," said lead author Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State. "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.
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. According to the study, this could be due to an automatic reflex, language play or a combination of the two.
The study also revealed a clash between what our brains expect to hear and what our ears hear in real time. 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.
"We got this kind of overarching effect: What you think she usually sounds like ends up clobbering the token that you just heard," explained Campbell-Kibler, who coauthored the study with Cynthia Clopper, a professor of linguistics at Ohio State. Campbell-Kibler's goal going into the study, which was conducted in Ohio State's Language Sciences Research lab at the Columbus Center of Science and Industry (COSI), 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.
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