COLUMBUS, Ohio – How do you tell if someone has a particular accent? It might seem obvious: You hear someone pronounce words in a way that is different from “normal” and connect it to other people from a specific place.
But a new study suggests that might not be the case.
“People probably don’t learn who has an accent from hearing someone talk and thinking, ‘huh, they sound funny’ – even though sometimes it feels like that’s how we do it,” said Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, author of the study and associate professor of linguistics at The Ohio State University.
Accents may be more of something we learn culturally, Campbell-Kibler said.
The study was published online recently in the Journal of Sociolinguistics.
The study is part of a long-term project that Ohio State researchers have been conducting at the Language Sciences Research Lab at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), a science museum in Columbus.
In this study, researchers asked visitors to the museum to participate in a study about accents. In the end, 1,106 people age 9 and up – mostly Ohioans – took part.
All participants heard a series of recordings, each featuring a speaker saying several words, all with the same vowel in them.
“Americans often listen to vowels to judge how much of an accent someone has,” Campbell-Kibler said.
For example, some people may pronounce “pen” so that it sounds to others like they are saying “pin.”
In all, participants heard 15 speakers pronounce words like “pass,” “food” and “pen.”
Participants rated each speaker on a scale from “not at all accented” to “very accented.”
Although the participants weren’t told this at the time, all the speakers had grown up in one of three regions of Ohio that linguists have coded as having particular accents: northern Ohio (the Inland North accent), central Ohio (the Midland accent) and southern Ohio (the South accent).
After rating the accents of the people they heard, participants were then asked to rate how accented they thought the speech was in various parts of Ohio on a scale of 0 (no accent) to 100 (very accented). Based on the similarity of answers, Campbell-Kibler was able to collapse them into the three categories of northern, central and southern Ohio.
In general, museum visitors thought people from southern Ohio had the strongest accents, somewhere near 60 to 70 on the scale. Central Ohio residents didn’t have much of an accent, according to participants, with a score averaging 20 to 25. They weren’t sure about northern Ohio residents, who had a score near 50 on the scale.
Results showed that Ohioans take until adulthood to fully absorb these beliefs about the differing accents in the state. The 9-year-old participants didn’t show much differentiation in perceptions between north and south – it took until about age 25 before the beliefs leveled off.
But here is what most interested Campbell-Kibler about the results.
If a person reported that northern Ohioans in general had a strong, noticeable accent – say they rated them 90 on the scale of 0-100 – you would expect that when they heard a recording of a northern Ohioan speaking, they would rate it as very accented.
But that didn’t occur. People who thought northern Ohioans in general had a strong accent didn’t think the accent of the actual northern Ohio speaker they heard was more accented than those from other areas of the state.
The same was true for the other regions in Ohio that were rated.
“Just because people gave a high rating to the idea that people in southern Ohio have an accent, that doesn’t mean they are good at hearing how actual southern Ohioans pronounce vowels differently,” Campbell-Kibler said.
So if people can’t pick up on accents from hearing them directly, then how do they learn about them?
“It is perplexing. We don’t know the full answer for why this is,” Campbell-Kibler said.
But part of the answer may be that we learn about accents culturally, through other people, and through hearing people on TV shows and movies.
“We may hear friends say they have an aunt in Akron who talks funny or hear people on the TV or the movies from Alabama or Britain talk differently than we do,” Campbell-Kibler said.
“We may not be able to identify an accent – we just know something is there because friends are telling stories about it or we hear the characters on TV.
“There’s a lot more we need to learn about how accents are represented cognitively in our brains,” she said.
