How easy is it to change your accent?

Some people can pick up new accents instantly. How do they do it? And can I learn to speak like an office worker in Cincinnati with the help of some new science?

Jennifer Scapetis-Tycer, a dialect coach, is smiling at me from my computer screen as she prepares me for my first-ever attempt at acting.

"You're an American office worker who lives in Cincinnati," she says, "and you're coming home and you've got armfuls of shopping, and you have to get everyone's attention because you want people to put the shopping away."

She briefly pauses, then switches to an American accent as she gives me my line: "Hi, I'm home! Where is everybody?" 

In real life, I'm a German-born journalist living in England, I've never been to Cincinnati, and I've never tried speaking in an American accent in my life. But we're having a video call because Scapetis-Tycer, who is an associate professor in voice, speech and dialects at the University of Connecticut, has co-authored a research paper on what makes some people so good at changing accents. And the best way to fully grasp her insights is, surely, to have a go myself. (There are two recorded practice samples below, for those of you who wish to join in!)

Since "American accent" can mean many things – there are, after all, countless different accents spoken in the US – she picks a version some call General American, which can for example be heard in Cincinnati but also other places. 

Over the next few minutes, Scapetis-Tycer teaches me to raise the back of my tongue, project my voice diagonally forward and up, widen my mouth, change my "o", and create an American "r" sound with my tongue and back teeth, as I try to transform into my new Cincinnati self. My first efforts produce an oddly strangled sound that's nothing like her sample line. Clearly, I'm going to have a lot to learn from her research. In fact, as it turns out, there's a lot of hidden, complex work all of us do when hearing and voicing accents – even without being professional mimics.

A basic definition of an accent is that "it's a way of speaking that's shared by members of a language community," says Emily Myers, a professor in speech, language, and hearing sciences at the University of Connecticut, who teamed up with Scapetis-Tycer for the paper on accent imitation. This could be a group of people from the same region, city, country or age group, Myers explains. The accent may include pronouncing words in a certain way, but also, aspects such as melody, a high or low pitch, and fast or slow speech: "All of those things play into what we hear when we hear an accent", be it a regional one or a foreign accent, says Myers.

Anyone who's ever learned a foreign language knows how anxiety-inducing it can be to imitate those features just so that we can be understood. And sometimes people even change their natural accent in response to accentism – meaning, discrimination and prejudice against certain accents.

In a performance accents matter because "they are telling us part of the story, where the characters are from, what identities they hold", says Scapetis-Tycer, who trains actors at the university's drama department, as well as at a theatre.

Hearing and understanding the accent, and its regular sound patterns, is the first step in trying to imitate it. "For instance, where I'm from in the upper Midwest, people will say something like 'baig', with the vowel like in 'bagel', for 'bag'," Myers says. If you hear that accent for the first time, your brain has to figure out that this Midwestern "baig" is the same as your "bag", and that this pattern probably also applies to other "a"-sounds.

Considering this complex brain work, it's no wonder listening to speech in an unfamiliar accent involves a bigger cognitive effort than hearing a familiar one. But it gets easier with practice, research suggests: the more we hear a given accent, the less effort we have to make to understand it. Studies suggest that we may even unconsciously start to mimic the other accent a little, because humans........

© BBC