It is no secret that we all have different accents, even when speaking the same language it can sound very different. However, have you ever thought since when we developed a unique accent of our own? Is it determined since birth or influenced by other environmental factors? Let’s take a closer look at our development of accent since the beginning.
In order to deduce when we were able to differentiate different accents, researchers from University of Hong Kong held two experiments to test a group of participants ranging from 3 to 7 years old. As the experiment took place in the United States, all the participants are native Americans.
- Different accents analogously
In the first experiment, it tests children in which age group have the ability to distinguish between different accents, in this case between Dutch and American English accents. The same experiment was also practiced on several adults as a control group. In the first round, two researchers would describe the outlook of object A and object B in Dutch and American accents respectively, then require the participant to choose the graphic that fit their description. In the second round, another researcher with Dutch accent would describe object A again while a researcher with American accent would describe object B. Meanwhile, the researchers would track eye movement of the participants to observe whether they could identify researchers’ preferred objects after noticing their accent, but before actually describing the outlooks.
Unfortunately, the experiment result didn’t show significant evidence that the participants could predict speakers’ preference based on their accents. The experiments were originally planned to be testing on children between age 3 to 5 only. However, as in the first test no evidence of children having the ability to distinguish accents could be observed, therefore, another experiment that requires more social-processing was held to search for the conclusion.
2. Friendship-judgment task
As the first experiment failed to distinguish when children start to develop their accents, the second experiment was designed to be more socially related and recruited several older children under 7 years old. In the second experiment, the participants were required to choose between two unseen speakers, one with Dutch accent and the other with American accent, which they think is more friendly. In the experiment, it was shown that the children aged between 5 to 7 can effectively identify the difference in accents and mostly chooses the American accent speaker. which is more familiar for them, to be more friendly.
In the two experiments, it showed that children aged around 3 to 5 did not use accent differences to inform sentence processing. A social-decision-making task suggested that this may have been driven by younger children failing to detect the accent, with a strong increase in accent bias from age 3 years to age 7 years. Results are more consistent with a protracted perceptual learning account of accent sensitivity than with an account that accent is a salient, early social signal. Comparing the two results, it is estimated that children start to recognize different accents at the age of 5 and start to develop their own accents. For that reason, it is recommended to increase children’s exposure to different accents between age 5 to 7 for them to develop an unique accent that fits themselves. If you are not sure where you can find native speakers as teachers or afraid of the pandemic, go check our website for online courses held by native teachers all around the world!
Credit: Creel, S. C. (2017, July 3). Accent detection and social cognition: evidence of protracted learning. Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.12524.
