How we perceive accents might be informed more by culture than by ear

When a person hears someone talk, it usually doesn’t take long for them to key in on that person’s accent.

In just a few syllables, the person who is listening might already be forming assumptions about the speaker’s geographical, social or ethnic background.

But how do we do this? A new study, part of a long-term project by researchers at Ohio State University, provides some clues.

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler is an associate professor at OSU’s Department of Linguistics. Her findings were published earlier this month in the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

Matthew Rand: I want to get to your findings in a moment, but first I have to ask: do I have an accent?

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Well, as a sociolinguist, I have to tell everybody they all have accents. Accent just means how you talk. So when you think you don't have an accent, that's usually just because other people sort of don't feel comfortable telling you that you do. And so then we pay attention to the power dynamics to see who gets to be told that and who doesn't.

Matthew Rand: Fair enough. Conventional wisdom would have it that people identify accents just by listening to the speaker and noticing they pronounce words in a way that sounds “funny” or different from what they think of as normal. But your research suggests that's not quite right.

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah, you would think that that's how it happens. And I think a lot of people do. And in fact, when I interview Ohioans, they often say things like, “Oh, yeah, my college roommate's mother was from Akron, so I know that they talk this way.” So, you know, we thought that that's how that would go. But what we did was we checked whether people who said “Oh, hey, people in this part of Ohio have an accent,” and we saw whether they were the same people that also were really good at picking those linguistic features of the people that sounded like they were from that place out of a crowd. And it's not the same people. So, we think that that's not how it's happening.

Matthew Rand: The study included a little over 1,100 participants, and most of them were from Ohio. Tell us a bit about the main regional accents we have here in the state, and how did focusing on listeners as well as speakers from Ohio inform your findings?

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: So Ohio is really fun to study for accents and dialect, because we're kind of in the middle of everything. We have some areas that fall into the three major American dialect regions, what we usually call the South, the Midland and the North. And so that's part of why I wanted to do this study here, was because we do have that variation.

What we did was ask participants how much of an accent they thought the person had. And then we also asked them how much of an accent they thought happened in different parts of Ohio. And so, people are actually pretty good at hearing the features, the vowel pronunciations that belong to the different places. And we do see patterns in people saying, “Oh, this vowel sound more like an accent and this one sounds less like an accent.” But what we don't see is that the people who are best at that are also the people that are rating the different places more differently.

Matthew Rand: So, based on your research, what do you think are the biggest influences on our perception of accents?

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: We think it's more to do with how we talk about accents and where they happen. And we see this also in our data. We had kids as young as nine in our study, and it took folks until their early 20s before their ratings for the different places in Ohio looked like the older adults. So all through the teen years, you still had people kind of learning “Oh, I think of southern Ohio as more accented. I'm supposed to think of central Ohio as less accented.” That pattern doesn't stabilize until the early 20s. So I think a big part of what's happening is it's not that we don't notice people's speech, but I think a bigger ingredient is how we talk to each other about accents in different places.

Matthew Rand: How do our personal biases or experiences influence our perception of accents?

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Yeah so a lot about accents is just like all the other things we talk about when we talk about other people. We use these tools to make meaning, to make differences, to make similarities, to say “Oh, I think this person is like me or I think this person isn't like me.” Accents and commenting on how people pronounce things is just one of the ways that we do that. So yeah, we talk about personal biases, but it's really just the whole picture of how we think about the world and other people.

Matthew Rand: What's next for your research as you continue looking at this question of how we think about accents?

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler: Well, I'm having some fun with some different tools. Some of my psycholinguist colleagues use eye trackers to do some of their work. I'm writing up a study now where we adapt the tools that they use, the eye trackers, to have a new way of studying how we perceive each other.