Some instantly adopt new accents. How do they do it? A BBC journalist of German descent living in the UK tried to learn an accent and speak like an office worker from the American city of Cincinnati in Ohio’s Hamilton County.
Jennifer Scapetis-Ticer, a stage speech teacher, smiles at me from her computer screen. We are preparing for my first ever acting attempt.
Imagine you are an American office worker from Cincinnati,” she says. – You come home with your arms full of shopping and try to get your family’s attention to help you sort them out.
She pauses briefly, “Hey, I’m home! Where is everyone?”
In real life, I am a German-born journalist who lives in England, has never been to Cincinnatus, and has never tried to imitate an American accent. The Connecticut native co-authored a study on why some people are so adept at changing accents.
Over the next few minutes, Scapetis-Tyser teaches me to raise the root of my tongue, direct my voice diagonally forward and upward, open my mouth wider, pronounce the “o” sound differently, and create the distinctive American “r” sound with my tongue.
This is how I’m trying to morph into my new Cincinnati persona. My first attempts produce a strange squashed sound, not at all like her sample. Obviously, the results of her research will reveal many more things to me.
Finally, it turns out: each of us has a huge hidden and complex job when we hear or reproduce accents – even if we don’t do imitation professionally.
“The basic definition of an accent is a mode of speech common to members of a particular language community,” says Emily Myers, a professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Connecticut.
She worked with Scapetis-Ticer on a paper on accent imitation.
Myers explains that such a community can be a group of people from the same region, city, country or age group. An accent can encompass not only the specific pronunciation of words, but also aspects such as melody, pitch, and rate of speech:
All of these affect what exactly we perceive as an accent – whether it is regional or foreign.
The excitement comes from trying to reproduce these features just to be understood.
And sometimes people even change their natural accent because of “accentism” – that is, discrimination and prejudice against certain pronunciation variants.
In acting, accents are important because “they tell part of the story: where characters come from and what communities they belong to,” notes Scheipetis-Ticer, who trains actors in the university’s theatre department as well as in theatre.
The first step to mimicking an accent is being able to hear and understand its regular sound patterns.
For example, where I’m from (in the upper Midwest), people say something like baig with a loud, as in the word bagel, instead of bag,” Myers says.
If you’re hearing this accent for the first time “baig” is the same as your “bag,” and that rule probably applies to other “a” sounds as well
Given such complex brain function, it’s not surprising that hearing speech with an unfamiliar accent requires more cognitive effort than listening (4) which gets easier with practice: the more often we hear a particular accent, the less effort we spend understanding it.
Once your brain has figured out how an accent works, the next step is to try to reproduce it.
“You need to engage your own broadcasting organs – mouth, vocal links, breathing – to control the imitation,” says Myers.
In the case of my faux Cincinnati resident’s accent, one of the main challenges was to move the voice deeper toward the back of the mouth. According to stage speech teacher Scapetis-Ticer, this is what creates a typically American sound, as opposed to the front of the mouth, which gives a more British sound.
Accent imitation is “an incredibly complex system that encompasses the internal model and its subsequent external reproduction,” Myers concludes. And adds: “Some people do it very well.”
To find out their secret, Myers, Scheipetis-Ticer and their colleague Anna Olson asked 92 native speakers of North American English to imitate the broadcast patterns of people with three different accents: from English Yorkshire, Scottish Edinburgh and the Province of Edinburgh.
The researchers also tested the participants for certain skills that potentially help master accents.
In particular, they investigated whether the subjects had a good musical ear and how fast they could pronounce sounds in a test with cursive phrases. The researchers also analysed participants’ personality traits, such as openness to new experiences and satisfaction with social interaction.
Author photo, Getty Images
“Interestingly, the best indicator of whether you would be good at imitating accents turned out to be the test with the cursive words,” says Myers.
People who could move their articulatory apparatus very quickly to reproduce the rapid sound of a cursive phrase also performed well in mimicking accents.
She says there is a definite link between “dexterity” (the ability to masterfully control mouth movements during speech) and the ability to copy accents.
Another important indicator was musical ability: those who were better at recognising sounds in the music test were also more successful at imitating accents.
“People with good hearing, which is to be expected, are able to pick up subtle nuances of pronunciation,” Myers notes.
Personal qualities play a role.
“Openness to new experiences and willingness to try something unknown is another factor that indicates imitation ability,” Myers explains.
However, the team found no link with extroversion, a trait that defines sociability and openness to people.
Scheipetis-Ticer notes that it is possible to be open to new people, willingly experiment and even perform on stage without being extroverted:
Among great actors, there are many who remain quite introverted individuals offstage.
Some of the findings coincide with previous studies that have also demonstrated a link between musicality and language imitation. In one such experiment, native speakers of Chinese and Catalan were asked to reproduce fragments of speech from different languages, specifically Hebrew, Japanese, Tagalog, Turkish and Vietnamese.
Those who demonstrated high levels of musicality also did well on the language test. In other studies, musical skills have helped people copy French accents more accurately and pick up subtle aspects of speech: emotional colouring, pitch, melody and rhythm. Not surprisingly, because of the flexibility of the voice, well-singing people are usually better at imitating accents.
Skapetis-Ticer cautions, however, that these results should be viewed in a nuanced way.
“What’s interesting to me from a pedagogical standpoint is that we already teach many of these skills in the theatre department,” she says. – ‘In all the acting courses we develop people’s openness, we train articulation, sense of rhythm and tone, and sometimes they also do singing.”
In the future, she aims to find out if these skills and traits are really the reason for successful accent imitation, if there are other underlying factors that allow a person to be adept at all of these at the same time.
And, of course, there are quite a few people who don’t grasp an accent instantly, but master it brilliantly through practice.
Actually Scapetis-Tyser herself developed her imitation skills gradually. She is Australian, but because she has spent most of her professional life in the UK and the US, she has almost never had to work with her native accent.
“I always pretended to be British or American, and I had to work hard to get good at it,” she recalls. – Afterwards, it caught on and I really loved it.”
Author photo, Credit: Serenity Strull /BBC/Getty Images
Inspired by her enthusiasm, I’m making another attempt to master the Cincinnati accent. (Scapetis-Ticer chose this particular city because she once lived there and liked it so much; you can hear this pronunciation from many, though not all, residents.)
I’m a great example of why lab tests don’t give the full picture. I play a musical instrument, have lived in several countries, and speak several languages: according to the study, I should do perfectly well.
I really agonise, constantly stopping and bursting into nervous laughter. Actually, I feel “language anxiety” – a condition where you’re so afraid of sounding stupid that you’d rather not speak at all.
This is particularly surprising to me, since I don’t experience anxiety when I’m learning new words. But, as Myers explains, learning sounds is different from learning words. After all, there are many people whose vocabulary is as good as native speakers, but whose accent still retains echoes of their native language.
“We don’t know exactly why learning new sounds is so much harder than learning new words,” Myers adds.
She suggests: it may have to do with the fact that speech sounds are the building blocks for words. To learn a new word even in a foreign language, she says, we can use the native sounds we already know to approximate the pronunciation.
So instead of working to perfectly copy new foreign sounds, we simply recycle what we already have. For example, a native English speaker can pronounce “ro-zay” with an English “r” and it will be close enough to the French pronunciation of the word “rosé” to be understood.
Perhaps my brain just doesn’t see the point of making a huge effort to pretend to be a Cincinnati resident if I’m already understood thanks to my old, familiar sounds.
My attempts only get better when I stop trying to twist my tongue and just focus on listening to and imitating Scapetis-Ticer.
“Hi, I’m home! Where is everyone?” – I exclaim, enjoying the relaxed, wide sound of American Loudspeakers.
I even add a little improvisation from myself: “Look how much stuff I bought!”.
At the end of the interview, under the guidance of Scapetis-Ticer, I also try to replicate an Australian accent (the secret is whether she speaks to stretch her lips wider).
After the call ends, I find an old sitcom set in Cincinnatus and mumble a few lines to myself. Don’t get me wrong: that slurred English-Norman voice I got years ago has served me well, and I have no intention of getting rid of it.
But maybe it’s time to broaden my horizons? After all, there are plenty of accents in English to explore, and Cincinnati may be just the beginning.