How easy is it to change your accent?
Serenity Strull/ BBC/ Getty ImagesSome people can pick up new accents instantly. How do they do it? And can I learn to speak like an office worker in Cincinnati with the help of some new science?
Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer, a dialect coach, is smiling at me from my computer screen as she prepares me for my first-ever attempt at acting.
"You're an American office worker who lives in Cincinnati," she says, "and you're coming home and you've got armfuls of shopping, and you have to get everyone's attention because you want people to put the shopping away."
She briefly pauses, then switches to an American accent as she gives me my line: "Hi, I'm home! Where is everybody?"
In real life, I'm a German-born journalist living in England, I've never been to Cincinnati, and I've never tried speaking in an American accent in my life. But we're having a video call because Scapetis-Tycer, who is an associate professor in voice, speech and dialects at the University of Connecticut, has co-authored a research paper on what makes some people so good at changing accents. And the best way to fully grasp her insights is, surely, to have a go myself. (There are two recorded practice samples below, for those of you who wish to join in!)
Since "American accent" can mean many things – there are, after all, countless different accents spoken in the US – she picks a version some call General American, which can for example be heard in Cincinnati but also other places.
Over the next few minutes, Scapetis-Tycer teaches me to raise the back of my tongue, project my voice diagonally forward and up, widen my mouth, change my "o", and create an American "r" sound with my tongue and back teeth, as I try to transform into my new Cincinnati self. My first efforts produce an oddly strangled sound that's nothing like her sample line. Clearly, I'm going to have a lot to learn from her research. In fact, as it turns out, there's a lot of hidden, complex work all of us do when hearing and voicing accents – even without being professional mimics.
A basic definition of an accent is that "it's a way of speaking that's shared by members of a language community," says Emily Myers, a professor in speech, language, and hearing sciences at the University of Connecticut, who teamed up with Scapetis-Tycer for the paper on accent imitation. This could be a group of people from the same region, city, country or age group, Myers explains. The accent may include pronouncing words in a certain way, but also, aspects such as melody, a high or low pitch, and fast or slow speech: "All of those things play into what we hear when we hear an accent", be it a regional one or a foreign accent, says Myers.
Anyone who's ever learned a foreign language knows how anxiety-inducing it can be to imitate those features just so that we can be understood. And sometimes people even change their natural accent in response to accentism – meaning, discrimination and prejudice against certain accents.
In a performance accents matter because "they are telling us part of the story, where the characters are from, what identities they hold", says Scapetis-Tycer, who trains actors at the university's drama department, as well as at a theatre.
Hearing and understanding the accent, and its regular sound patterns, is the first step in trying to imitate it. "For instance, where I'm from in the upper Midwest, people will say something like 'baig', with the vowel like in 'bagel', for 'bag'," Myers says. If you hear that accent for the first time, your brain has to figure out that this Midwestern "baig" is the same as your "bag", and that this pattern probably also applies to other "a"-sounds.
Considering this complex brain work, it's no wonder listening to speech in an unfamiliar accent involves a bigger cognitiveeffort than hearing a familiar one. But it gets easier with practice, research suggests: the more we hear a given accent, the less effort we have to make to understand it. Studies suggest that we may even unconsciously start to mimic the other accent a little, because humans often adjust to each other's ways of speaking.
Serenity Strull/ BBC/ Getty ImagesOnce your brain has figured out how the accent works, the next step is to try and produce it.
"You need to move your own articulators – your mouth, your vocal folds, your respiration – to control the imitation," Myers says.
In the case of my fake Cincinnati-based accent, for example, one of my core tasks was to move my voice further towards the back of my mouth to create a more American English sound, rather than using the front part, which produces a more British English sound, according to Scapetis-Tycer, the dialect coach.
Accent imitation "is an incredibly complex system that involves this internal model and then somehow, feeding it out", Myers concludes. And, she says: "Some people are extraordinarily good at it."
To find out what their secret is, Myers, Scapetis-Tycer and their colleague Hannah Olson asked 92 north American English speakers to imitate samples by native speakers of three different accents: Yorkshire, England; Edinburgh, Scotland; and the Eastern Cape region of South Africa.
The researchers also tested the participants on a selection of skills thought to potentially play a role in being good at accents, including whether they had a good ear for music, and how well they were able to rapidly produce sounds in a tongue-twister test (you can try a similar test with the recording below). The researchers also tested the participants' personalities for traits to do with being open to new experiences, and enjoying social interactions.
"Interestingly enough, the very best predictor of whether you would be good at [imitating accents] is the tongue twister task," Myers says. People who were able to move their mouth very, very quickly to copy the rapid-fire sound of the tongue twister, also did well in the accent-imitation task. "It seems there is something about agility", or how skilful you are in moving your mouth to produce speech, that helps with accent imitation, she says.
Musical skill turned out to be another predictor: those who scored well on identifying sounds in the musical test, also did well in the accent-imitation test. "People who have a good ear, maybe not too surprisingly, were able to pick up on some of these details" of the accents, says Myers.
Personality also seemed to play a role. "People who scored highly on an aspect of personality called openness – which captures your openness to new experiences, your willingness to try new things – that was also a good predictor of whether someone was a good imitator," Myers says. However, the team did not find any connection with extraversion, which captures how sociable and outgoing someone is.
Scapetis-Tycer emphasises that one can be open, and willing to try things and even perform on stage, without being an extravert: "You get some very good actors who, when they're not on stage, are quite introverted personalities."
Some of the findings chime with previous studies that have also shown a link between musicality and language imitation. In one study, Chinese speakers and and those who spoke Catalan were asked to imitate snippets from a wide range of languages including Hebrew, Japanese, Tagalog, Turkish and Vietnamese. (The study did not indicate if the Chinese participants spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, or both). Those who separately tested well on musicality also performed well in the language-imitation test. In other studies, musical skills predicted how accurately people imitated a French accent, and how well they picked up on subtle aspects of speech, such as emotion and the pitch, melody and rhythm of speech. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their vocal flexibility, people who are good at singing, in particular, tend to be better at accent imitation.
Still, Scapetis-Tycer cautions that the findings should be looked at with nuance.
"What is interesting to me, pedagogically, is that many of these things are actually things we already train [in the drama department]," she says. "We teach people openness in all our acting classes, and we teach people articulation, rhythm awareness, pitch awareness, and sometimes they're singing."
In the future, she is keen to understand if the skills and traits in the study actually cause people to be better at imitating accents – or if there are just underlying reasons for why someone might be good at all of these things. And of course, there are many people who might not grasp an accent on the spot, but will master it beautifully with practice.
In fact, Scapetis-Tycer herself developed her imitation skills over time. She is Australian but, having spent most of her professional life in the UK and US, has almost never worked in her own accent. "I was always pretending I was British or American, and I had to work really hard to be good at that," she says. "And then it became fascinating to me, and I loved it."
Serenity Strull /BBC/ Getty ImagesEncouraged by her enthusiasm, I give the Cincinnati-based accent another go. (Scapetis-Tycer chose Cincinnati because she lived there, and liked it a lot; the accent is spoken by some but not all people there).
I'm a good illustration of why lab tests don't tell you the whole story. I play an instrument, have lived in several countries and speak several languages: based on the findings, I should be absolutely acing this task. But I'm really struggling, and keep breaking off and bursting into nervous laughter. Basically, I'm experiencing foreign language anxiety, where you're so worried about sounding stupid, you'd rather say nothing at all. This is especially surprising to me as I don't feel this anxiety when learning new words. But as Myers explains, learning sounds is different from learning words. After all, there are many people whose vocabulary rivals that of a native speaker, but whose accent still carries traces of their first language.
"We don't fully know why learning new sounds is so hard in proportion to learning new words," Myers adds. She speculates that it may be because the sounds of a language are the building blocks of words. To learn a new word, even in a foreign language, she says, we can use our existing, known, native sounds to approximate the new word. So, rather than having to work at perfectly imitating the new, foreign sounds, we can recycle what we already have. A native English speaker may, for example, say something like "ro-zay", with an English "r", and it would be close enough to the French pronunciation of "rosé" for the word to be understood.
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Perhaps, then, my brain just doesn't quite see the point of making a big effort to pretend I'm from Cincinnati – when I can already make myself understood with my old, existing sounds.
My attempts only get better when I stop trying to contort my tongue, and simply focus on listening to and imitating Scapetis-Tycer. "Hi, I'm home! Where is everybody?" I roar, enjoying the relaxed, wide feel of the American vowels. I even improvise a little flourish of my own – "I got all this shoppin'!". At the end of the interview, I have a go at an Australian accent, too, with Scapetis-Tycer's guidance (the clue is in widening my lips, she says).
After the call ends, I look up an old sitcom set in Cincinnati, and mutter some of the lines to myself. Don't get me wrong: the vaguely Anglo-German voice I acquired all those years ago has served me well, and I'm not planning to ditch it. But maybe it's time to branch out? After all, there are countless English accents to explore; Cincinnati might just be the start.
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