Why we copy others’ way of speaking
As you probably know if you’ve read other blogs of mine, I lived in Cornwall until the age of 18 and have since then moved around a lot, mostly for work reasons. However, I don’t sound very Cornish because (a) my parents aren’t from there so I never had a particularly strong accent to start with and (b) I’ve lived in a lot of different places that caused me to change how I spoke. I am kind of mad about the latter, because one reason I felt like I had to change the way I spoke when I moved away from Cornwall was the stereotype that Cornish people are close-minded and behind the times. If I could go back and change it I probably would, because stereotypes are ridiculous.
I first noticed that my accent had changed when I was about 19 and living near Birmingham. Because the UK packs a lot of accents into not much geography, people from Birmingham sound quite different to people from Cornwall, and after a while I picked up an occasional Brummie lilt to my sentences. That left when I moved away from the area, but later, living in Amsterdam, I picked up some Dutch inflections that have stayed with me. I didn’t get much accent shift from my time in Scotland, but I did pick up the phrase it gies me the boak (“it makes me feel sick”), which I still enjoy using.
Recently, living in the north of England, I’ve noticed my vowels have started to shorten so that what I used to call a ‘barth’ is now usually a ‘bath’. However, a very faint Cornish accent still pops up occasionally, when I am excited and/or talking about moors.
Moors!
(Yes, I know this is Devon but apparently free stock photo websites only have images of the Cornish coast, not the inland bit.)
From talking to friends about this phenomenon of accents shifting around I know it’s relatively common. We’re not always aware we’re doing it, but if we are, we can usually stop doing it if we want to.
Researchers know about it too, and they usually call it speech alignment.
There are lots of different ways in which we can adjust our own speech when talking to someone, including pitch and the way we pronounce vowels. We even adjust to imagined problems – we normally need to speak extra-clearly in noisy environments like moving cars, but we’ll start speaking more loudly, more slowly and at a higher pitched even in a parked car in a quiet area.
No-one yet has a definitive answer about why speech alignment happens, but there are several theories. All of these are, in one way or another, humans copy each other, but after that they head off in different directions. Let’s have a look at them.
Theories 1 and 2: The words are morphing in our heads!
There are two theories in this category, episodic and motor theory. They are pretty much the same, with the exception that episodic theory states that hearing someone else speak and producing your own speech are two separate processes, and motor theory says that hearing and speaking are intertwined. In both cases, any time we hear a word it leaves a ‘trace’ in our minds that influences how we think about that word and therefore how we say that word.
To understand how this works in the real world, imagine a Cornish person (hi, it’s me!) and a Mancunian (it’s my boyfriend!) are speaking with each other.
Manchester!
Over the time we’ve been together, I have become a little bit more Mancunian-sounding and my boyfriend has become a little bit more Cornish-sounding. Presumably we’ll eventually meet at some point in the middle (… Wales?).
What if there’s a group of people, say me and five Mancunian friends? Well, according to this word-morphing theories, if we’re in Manchester then shifting towards Mancunian would be helpful for me because it brings me closer to how most people around me sound, but shifting towards Cornish would not be helpful for them because it would take them further away from how most people around me sound. So, I should start to sound more Mancunian, but my friends probably won’t shift much towards sounding Cornish.
There are also other factors that can make a difference in how a person starts to align their speech with someone that they’re talking to. For example, men tend to align more than women, and people who are giving instructions tend to align more than those who are receiving them. Experience also matters: talking about Australia can cause New Zealanders’ pronunciations to shift, but that shift is towards Australian English for New Zealanders who have a lot of experience with that pronunciation, and away from it for New Zealanders who are inexperienced with it.
These experiments showing that we don’t consistently align with others’ ways of speaking are important, because they show that there’s no automatic link between listening and speaking like word-morphing theories say. There has to be another explanation.
Theory 3: We’re running a simulation!
… No, not like the Matrix.
When we’re planning to speak, our brain sends a kind of advance notification to muscles of what needs to be done to – get ready to lift your tongue, get ready to press your lips together, that kind of thing. The simulation theory says that we when we hear someone speak, we also use these advance notifications to work out the muscle movements that we’d have to make to produce the same sounds, and that then affects how we sound when it’s our turn to speak – we recalibrate how our muscles work!
In the real world, let’s think about a Cornish person (hi, me again) who’s moved to Fife, in Scotland.
Fife!
I’d encountered Scottish people before I lived in Scotland, of course, but Scotland has lots of different accents, just as the other parts of the British Isles do. I would occasionally encounter someone whose pronunciation style was unknown to me. Sometimes, I found it very difficult to understand what they were saying at first, and I had to kind of ‘tune in’ over the course of a couple of sentences. According to the simulation theory, I was (without knowing it) internally replicating what they were saying as though I were preparing to say it myself, and then when I spoke I’d say something very slightly more Scottish-sounding than I otherwise would have done.
Well, OK, that sounds plausible. But I’ve got one more theory for you…
Theory 4: We’re subtly communicating something about ourselves
The problem with all the theories that I’ve talked about so far is that they don’t take any notice of the social roles of the two speakers. In your own life, how you speak to family members is probably quite different from how you speak to your boss, and different again from how you speak to someone serving you coffee – not just in terms of the topics you talk about, but in terms of the level of familiarity or formality, whether you’re expecting to have to please them or to have them please you, and so on. Every single conversation we ever have takes account of these social roles as well as other aspects of our selves, like race, gender and age. Though that information about us mostly goes unspoken, we still communicate it in how we talk.
Communication accommodation theory is a much broader theory than the others I’ve covered because it is an attempt to explain lots of different reasons and ways that we change our speaking style, and what impact that has on our interactions. One small part of the theory is that we may shift towards other people’s speaking patterns because we are sending subtle messages about how we want to be seen – like we have a shared goal. However, if we don’t shift, that also sends a message – perhaps I am not like you and I don’t want to be. Shifting too much could also send a different type of message – like I am nervous because I desperately want you to like me.
Speaking of desperately wanting to be liked, when I moved to Amsterdam I didn’t know anyone in the whole of the Netherlands, and I was also very self-conscious about my extremely poor Dutch skills. According to communication accommodation theory, the reason I started developing slightly Dutch pronunciations when speaking English was that I was attempting to get Dutch potential friends to view me as one of them even though I spoke very little Dutch. I don’t think that’s why they started to like me, but who knows?
Amsterdam!
There’s a lot of evidence for this theory, far too much for me to cover here, so I will give you some highlights. People who are sensitive to rejection are more likely to shift their speech patterns than people who aren’t very sensitive to it. We’re more likely to mimic smiles than frowns, which may help create a positive feedback loop that builds rapport. If we copy the facial expressions and actions of another person, that typically increases how much that person likes us and how smooth they perceive the social interaction to be.
So which theory is right?
While I was reading for this blog, I found the thesis of now-Dr Jarosław Lelonkiewicz. He spent his whole PhD researching this question and his conclusion was this: there is absolutely no reason that the simulation theory and the communication accommodation theory couldn’t both be right. People don’t necessarily all behave in the same way, and even tomorrow-you might not behave in the same way as today-you. Sometimes you might need to understand someone better so you simulate their speech. Sometimes you might need to form a bond with someone so you imitate them in some way. Sometimes you might need someone to view you as authoritative so you retain your own way of speaking instead of shifting. Sometimes more than one of these is true. Sometimes none of these is true.