Mimicking to follow accent

Finding someone's accent difficult to understand? A new study says that mimicking one's accent can help you get what one's saying.

Researchers at University of Manchester have carried out the study and found that imitating someone may actually be our brain's way of helping us understand someone, according to the Psychological Science journal.

If people are talking to each other, they tend to sort of move their speech toward each other.

For their study, researchers devised an experiment to test the effect of imitating on subsequent comprehension of sentences spoken in that accent.

In the experiment, Dutch volunteers were first tested on how well they understood sentences spoken in an unfamiliar accent of Dutch.

To make sure all listeners were unfamiliar, a new accent was invented for the study, in which all the vowels were swapped — for instance “ball” would be pronounced as “bale”.