If you spend time in any large
city in the United States, chances are you will hear English spoken in a
variety of accents. Some of these
accents are just native speakers of English from different regions of the country,
while others reflect the speech patterns of people who learned another language
as a child and then learned English later.
A foreign accent matters in social
situations. The accent immediately marks
someone as an outsider, which can lead to distrust. In addition, some native speakers find
accents hard to understand, and so the accent can also create difficulties in
communication.
Are accents a fixed part of a
person’s speech pattern in their non-native language? This question was explored by Matthew
Goldrick, Elin Runnqvist, and Albert Costa in a paper in the April, 2014 issue
of Psychological Science.
These researchers were interested
in whether switching back-and-forth between languages would affect the strength
of a person’s accent. To test this
possibility, participants were run in Barcelona, Spain. All of them were native speakers of Spanish
who began learning English by the age of 4.
In this study, participants saw
pictures of simple objects on a computer screen in which the first sound of the
word for that object began with a d (as in desk
or doce) or a t (as in tin or taza). The picture was
surrounded by a colored frame.
Participants were instructed to use the English word for one color and
the Spanish word for the other color. The
key question is whether participants would have a stronger accent on trials on
which they switched languages from the previous trial than on trials on which
they used the same language on consecutive trials.
It can be difficult to measure
strength of accent by ear, but the researchers used a clever method to study
the strength of the accent. When Spanish
speakers produce the sounds ‘d’ and ‘t’, they engage their vocal cords earlier
than when English speakers produce these same sounds. If you look at a digital recording of speech,
you can actually see the burst of noise when the vocal cords are engaged. The researchers did an acoustic analysis of
the ‘d’ and ‘t’ sounds at the start of each word to measure when the vocal
cords engaged.
Overall, speakers did
differentiate between the languages.
They engaged their vocal cords later when speaking English words than
when speaking Spanish words. The
language of the previous trial did not affect pronunciation of Spanish words,
but it did affect pronunciation of English words. Overall, participants engaged their vocal
cords a bit earlier when saying an English word if the previous word had been
spoken in Spanish than if the previous word had been spoken in English. That is, the person’s Spanish accent was
stronger if they had just said a Spanish word than if they had just said an
English word.
One interesting aspect of this
study is that some of the words used were cognates. That is, the words for the object were
similar in Spanish and English. For
example, the Spanish word for dentist
is dentista. The effect was particularly strong for these
cognates. That is, when participants had
just spoken a Spanish word and then they had to speak the English word for a
cognate, they had a stronger accent than when they had just spoken an English
word.
This result reflects that when
people speak multiple languages, they learn information both about the words
that are used in that language as well as how to pronounce those words. For cognates in particular, people have
experience speaking similar words in both languages. Speaking Spanish activates the Spanish
pronunciation of the word, while speaking English activates the English
pronunciation. When participants switch
languages, they get a combination of these pronunciations, which ultimately
affects how they speak those words.