Accents are funny things. If you were raised in the south but moved to the north (like me), you may have lost even the residue of a Southern drawl (also me). But if you’re surrounded by twangy relatives during the holidays, you may find yourself sliding right back into it (again, me). Conversely, if you’ve got a nondescript accent and move somewhere with a strong regional dialect, you might pick that up, as well. Now a new study is shedding light on how our brains choose which features of accents to imitate.
Linguists from Ohio State University recruited 136 English-speaking Americans and played them a recording of a college-educated Australian woman pronouncing five words featuring different vowel sounds: bath, trap, kit, price, and near. Roughly a third of the participants were instructed to imitate the speaker’s Aussie accent, another third was explicitly told not to, and the final third was simply told to repeat the words. Afterwards, the participants completed a questionnaire asking them their views of the mystery Australian and what they noticed about how she pronounced the words.
Read more: “The Key to Multilingualism Lies in the Ears, Not the Mouth”
Acoustic analysis revealed the participants were adept at both imitating the foreign accent or refraining, depending on instructions. But things got really interesting with the group that was merely told to repeat the speaker. When left to their own devices these participants tended to only mimic a few features of the accent, like dropping the “r” in “near” to pronounce it “nee-uh.” Follow-up questionnaires revealed these features tended to be the ones that drew the people’s attention.
“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,” study author Kathryn Campbell-Kibler explained in a statement. “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 team also uncovered some tension between what the participants expected to hear and what they actually heard. For example, participants copying the Australian vowels in words like “trap,” tended to overdo it, but pulled back when they heard the speaker use a broader vowel sound in words like the one in “bath.”
Finally, the researchers also noted that there was no hesitation among the group instructed to imitate the Aussie accent. According to the team, the enthusiasm was likely due to English speakers' esteem for Australians. “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,” the researchers wrote. “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 added.
It also may explain why Crocodile Dundee got two sequels. 
Enjoying Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
Lead Image: STEKLO / Shutterstock