COLUMBUS, Ohio (WOWO) — Picking up an accent from a television show, a partner or people in a new hometown may not be as automatic as many people think. Researchers at The Ohio State University say people have considerable control over when they imitate another person’s speech — but social expectations and the sounds they notice can influence what comes out of their mouths.
The study, published in the journal Laboratory Phonology, involved 136 American English speakers who listened to recordings of an Australian woman. Participants were instructed to imitate her accent, avoid imitating it or simply repeat the words they heard.
The researchers found that participants generally could follow those instructions. But when they were given no direction about imitation, they tended to copy individual features of the speaker’s accent that stood out to them.
“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 of linguistics at Ohio State.
Campbell-Kibler said people may unconsciously adopt particular sounds when they find them interesting or distinctive. In some cases, the behavior could be an automatic reflex, a form of language play or a combination of the two.
The recordings featured a college-educated white Australian woman in her 20s from Perth. When participants were specifically told to imitate her, they generally did so successfully. When instructed not to copy her accent, they largely maintained their usual speech patterns.
Without instructions, however, imitation was more selective. Some participants copied just one feature, such as dropping the “r” sound in a word like “near,” rather than adopting the speaker’s accent as a whole.
The research also found that what listeners expect an accent to sound like can override the specific sounds they hear.
Participants initially imitated the Australian vowel pronunciation in words such as “trap.” But when the speaker also used broader Australian vowel sounds in words such as “bath,” participants gradually stopped copying the earlier vowel feature.
The researchers believe listeners had developed expectations about the speaker’s accent and adjusted their own speech when the recording did not match those expectations.
“We got this kind of overarching effect: What you think she usually sounds like ends up clobbering the token that you just heard,” Campbell-Kibler explained.
She conducted the study with Cynthia Clopper, another Ohio State linguistics professor. The research took place in the university’s Language Sciences Research lab at the Columbus Center of Science and Industry.
The findings could help explain why people sometimes pick up aspects of another person’s accent but never completely adopt it. A person might live with a partner who speaks differently for decades without sounding exactly like them, for example. Someone who moves to another region might gradually develop a way of speaking that falls somewhere between their original accent and the local one.
A childhood Southern drawl might also become more noticeable when someone returns home and speaks with family members.
“How come we don’t always pick up everybody’s accent? This is actually a huge question mark,” Campbell-Kibler said, describing a longstanding question for linguists studying how people acquire and adapt speech patterns.
The researchers also noted that the social standing of an accent could affect how willing people are to imitate it. The Australian speaker’s dialect was likely to be viewed favorably by many American participants, making imitation less likely to be perceived as mockery.
Campbell-Kibler said people may react differently when an accent is associated with a group that faces social stigma. That suggests accent imitation is shaped not only by what people hear, but also by the social meaning they attach to the way someone speaks.
The researchers hope future work will further distinguish automatic imitation from deliberate language play and shed more light on how the brain processes speech.
Several research assistants involved in the project received support through National Science Foundation grants for Research Experiences for Undergraduates.
