Imitating accents makes them easier to understand

A University of Manchester study published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that imitating someone who speaks with a regional or foreign accent may actually help you understand them better. "If people are talking to each other, they tend to sort of move their speech toward each other,” said Dr Patti Adank, in Manchester's School of Psychological Sciences, who co-wrote the study with Peter Hagoort and Harold Bekkering from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. People don't only do this with speech, she says, they have a tendency to imitate each other in body posture, for instance in the way they cross their arms. She and her colleagues devised an experiment to test the effect of imitating and accent on subsequent comprehension of sentences spoken in that accent. In the experiment, Dutch volunteers were first tested on how well they understood sentences spoken in an unfamiliar accent of Dutch. To make sure that all listeners were unfamiliar, a new accent was invented for the study, in which all the vowels were swapped (for instance 'ball' would become 'bale'). Next, each participant listened to 100 sentences in the unfamiliar accent.