Imitation may help with understanding accents
I’m sure it’s happened to most people before: you meet someone with a new, interesting, or strong accent, and somewhere in your conversation with them, you feel yourself start slipping into an (often awful) imitation of their speech. When you realise you’re doing it, you feel like a bit of an idiot, and you hope they haven’t noticed.
So, it turns out that accent imitation, besides being used for intentional and accidental mockery of others, can actually help you to understand the speaker’s accent. A study in the Netherlands has shown that if accented speech is repeated, it helps the listener to better understand it.
The participants in the study were first asked to listen to an unfamiliar accent of Dutch. To ensure that the accent was unfamiliar to everyone, the researchers made up a new accent by doing a consistent vowel sound change. After this, the participants were asked to listen to 100 sentences in the unfamiliar accent. Participants were asked to respond to the sentences in different ways: some repeated the sentence aloud while trying to mimic the new accent, some repeated it in their own accent, some transcribed the sentence, and some only listened. When the sentences were tested again, those that had repeated using the unfamiliar accent did far better than the other groups.
Unfortunately, in real life, even if you know this information it’s not very polite to talk to someone while trying to imitate their speech patterns. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could always use this study as justification.
Full article: Science Daily.
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Adrian Morgan said,
December 19, 2010 @ 12:42 pm
People vary a lot in how they respond to foreign accents, which is usually not a choice but something outside their conscious control or even awareness. For example,I don’t imitate accents at all unless I choose to. I’m just not wired that way. By contrast, my sister, - at least when she was younger - would instinctively switch to the accent of whoever she was talking to.
My father has yet another response. He often puts on an accent himself, but it’s not the accent of the person he’s talking to. Instead, it’s always the same “generically foreign” accent. What’s interesting is that he is completely unaware that he is doing so - he genuinely believes that he is speaking in his usual accent, but slower.
Wendy said,
December 20, 2010 @ 3:03 am
The full article talked a little bit more about how people (in general) tend to assimilate the behaviour of the people they’re talking to, including posture and body language.
I totally know what you mean about the ‘generically foreign’ accent, though! I had a friend who did that whenever people had an accent, no matter how good their English was. She didn’t think she was doing it, but it made her sound a little bit…slow.
Electric Now Blog said,
December 28, 2010 @ 11:27 am
Others May Imitate…
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