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- calendar_today October 22, 2026
Research Challenges Belief in Unconscious Accent Imitation
Have you ever noticed yourself mimicking an accent after watching a foreign TV show or movie? It turns out, according to a recent study from The Ohio State University, that people can control how much they imitate another person's accent, rather than doing so purely automatically. The findings, published in Laboratory Phonology, suggest that social expectations and awareness of accent features strongly influence which aspects of another’s speech we adopt.
Experiment Examines Accent Imitation and Control
The study involved 136 American English speakers who listened to audio recordings of an Australian woman from Perth. Participants were given different instructions: some were asked to imitate the accent, others to avoid imitation, and some to simply repeat the words. The results showed that participants could successfully imitate the accent when asked and could actively avoid doing so when instructed not to. When participants received no explicit instruction, they mimicked only certain features, like the dropping of the 'r' sound in words such as near.
Social Influences and Linguistic Awareness Affect Imitation
Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, professor at Ohio State's Department of Linguistics and lead author of the study, explained that people are generally skilled at controlling their speech to match or not match someone else—is accent control. However, features that are particularly noticeable or socially significant may disrupt this control. When participants were left to their own devices, they would often adopt the accent features they found most interesting or meaningful, a mix of deliberate imitation and, possibly, language play.
Expectations Clash with Real-Time Perception
The study uncovered another intriguing aspect of language perception: participants’ preconceived notions about the speaker's accent sometimes overrode what they actually heard. For instance, while they initially imitated an Australian vowel sound in words like trap, they stopped doing so for words like bath when the vowel was pronounced more broadly than they expected. This demonstrates the powerful effect of mental expectations versus live auditory input.
Social Value of Accents and Implications for Research
The audio used in the study came from a speaker perceived by participants as belonging to a "positively valued group," which reduced any discomfort about imitation. According to the study's authors, the prestige associated with the Australian accent in this context allowed a close examination of which dialect features would be imitated.
Campbell-Kibler pointed out that people who move to new regions often develop an accent that blends their original and new speech patterns. She also noted that automatic and deliberate imitation likely interact, shaping language processing in complex ways. Campbell-Kibler plans to further investigate these mechanisms in future research.
Study Context and Acknowledgments
This research was conducted at Ohio State's Language Sciences Research lab at the Columbus Center of Science and Industry (COSI). Cynthia Clopper, also a professor of linguistics at Ohio State, co-authored the study. Several research assistants were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates.
Source: news.osu.edu.
