It would be well to thwart that appalling attempt at Scottish brogue. A team of researchers found that people in northern England and Ireland are particularly good at finding out if you’re faking it.
The study surveyed nearly 1,000 participants across the UK and Ireland and found that individuals from Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and the North East of England were better at identifying imitated native accents than participants from farther south. Appeared. The team’s research published today Evolutionary human science. The new paper only focuses on the British and Irish, but for those of us in North America, it’s a fair warning against trying out such terrible accents.
“We found for the first time that people across groups were better than average at detecting when someone was faking an accent,” said Jonathan Goodman, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and corresponding author. and across the seven accents of Ireland).” Paper emailed to Gizmodo. “Second, we found that some groups of native speakers were better than others at detecting whether someone was faking their accent.”
The team recorded speakers with accents from the North East of England, Belfast, Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow, Essex and Standard British English. Participants included “She kicked the goose hard,” “Jenny told him to look at his weight,” “Kit strutted across the room,” and “Catch these two cooked.” They were asked to record themselves saying several test sentences. Reactions such as ‘tea bag’ and ‘I thought taking a bath would make me happy’ were shown. A sentence contains certain words that ‘tell’ whether the speaker’s accent is real or fake.
“We worked with the phonetics lab here in Cambridge to develop a sentence that teases out accent-specific phoneme differences in the pronunciation of certain words,” Goodman said. “For example, for some people the word ‘bath’ rhymes with ‘road.’ To others, ‘moth’. These differences make up what we call accent-specific signals linked to regions across the UK and Ireland.”
Participants’ recordings were played in 2- to 3-second segments for other participants. The team found that participants from Belfast were the best at identifying fake accents, with locals from the North East of England and Dublin coming in second and third. Listeners in Essex, Bristol and London were the least accurate.
“This story predicts better imitation detection among speakers in places with high intergroup tensions, such as Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin, and explains why imitation detection is relatively poor even in places like Essex,” the team said. wrote in the paper. “Specifically, speakers of Essex accents have migrated from London to the region over the past 25 years, which is a strong contrast to speakers living in Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin. Accents in Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin have been around for centuries. It evolved through cultural tensions and violence.”
That’s one side of the coin. Another aspect is that people living in London and Bristol are surrounded by a greater variety of accents every day, so they may be less attuned to certain accents.
The study brings to mind a puzzling medical case described last year. A study published in BMJ Case Reports found a man with metastatic prostate cancer developed an “uncontrollable ‘Irish brogue’ accent despite having no Irish background”. The team concluded that the man suffered from foreign accent syndrome. This is a real phenomenon that causes listeners to perceive changes in a person’s speech as an accent. The work did not indicate how persuasive the Irish brogue was.
A recent study only surveyed British and Irish participants, but let’s not pretend Americans have a proper British or Irish accent. I think we’d all be better off not trying.
