Accent Imitation Is Largely Under Conscious Control, Speech Study Finds

People can deliberately switch accent imitation on and off, according to a new study from The Ohio State University, but the accent features they find socially meaningful tend to break through that control. The research, published in the journal Laboratory Phonology on 28 August 2026, challenges the common assumption that picking up someone else’s accent happens automatically and outside our awareness. Instead, the findings suggest that when listeners are left to their own devices, they imitate only the features of a speaker’s accent that they notice or find interesting, while explicit instructions can override that tendency almost entirely.

In the experiment, 136 American English speakers listened to recordings of an Australian woman and were assigned to one of three conditions: imitate the speaker, avoid imitating her, or simply repeat the words they had just heard. The recorded voice belonged to a college-educated white Australian woman in her twenties from Perth, a dialect the researchers describe as a prestigious variety for most American listeners. When participants were asked to imitate the Australian accent, they did so easily; when told not to imitate it, they maintained their normal speech patterns. Without explicit instructions, participants tended to imitate only a single feature, such as dropping the “r” sound in a word like near. The authors suggest this selective copying could stem from an automatic reflex, from language play, or from a combination of the two.

Participants’ awareness of specific accent features played a strong role in determining which sounds were copied. Features such as the vowel pronunciation in words like bath and trap proved especially influential. The study also revealed a tension between what listeners expect to hear and what they actually hear in real time. Participants initially copied the Australian vowel sound in words like trap, but they gradually stopped doing so when the speaker also used broad, distinct Australian vowels in words like bath. Once listeners had built up expectations of what the speaker’s accent should sound like, deviations from those expectations in the recording caused them to abandon imitation of that particular sound. “We got this kind of overarching effect: What you think she usually sounds like ends up clobbering the token that you just heard,” said lead author Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State.

“People are pretty good at controlling whether they sound like somebody, if you ask them to, but accent features that they find socially meaningful and notable will interfere with that,” Campbell-Kibler explained. “Basically, if we don’t tell you whether or not to imitate somebody, you’re going to sound like them on the bits that you notice or think are interesting.” She co-authored the study with Cynthia Clopper, a professor of linguistics at Ohio State. The work was conducted in Ohio State’s Language Sciences Research lab at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, and Campbell-Kibler’s goal was to understand how the perception side of language, the moment just after hearing somebody speak, influences the speech a person then produces.

The findings offer a framework for a puzzle that has long fascinated linguists: why people do not inevitably absorb the accents of everyone around them. Long-term relationships illustrate the point. Spouses with different accents may pick up some of each other’s features over decades without ever converging on a single way of speaking, and someone who grew up with a Southern drawl may find it surfaces most strongly in conversations with family. Campbell-Kibler noted that people who move to a new region often end up with an accent somewhere between where they came from and where they now live, a pattern consistent with the idea that imitation is selective rather than wholesale.

The researchers observed no hesitation among participants when it came to imitating the Australian speaker. In the paper, the authors write that the model talker spoke a dialect likely to be held in high regard by the participants, which allowed them to examine the imitation of different dialect features in a prestigious variety. Campbell-Kibler noted that because the speaker was perceived as a member of a positively valued group for most Americans, participants did not feel as though they were mocking her in the way they might if the accent were associated with a stigmatized group. This design choice means the study’s conclusions about willing imitation apply to prestigious dialects, and the researchers did not measure how participants would respond to a stigmatized variety.

The study was limited to American English speakers listening to a single Australian voice in a laboratory setting, so the findings describe controlled imitation of one dialect pair rather than the long-term accent changes that occur when people relocate or live together. Several research assistants on the project were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. In future research, Campbell-Kibler hopes to disentangle the mechanics of automatic imitation from deliberate language play, work she believes could lead to a clearer understanding of how the mind processes speech and decides, feature by feature, how much to sound like the person it is listening to.

Subject of Research: Cognitive control over phonetic accent imitation in American English speakers

Article Title: How much control do we have over picking up an accent? A lot, study finds

Article References: How much control do we have over picking up an accent? A lot, study finds. Original publication (Bibliographic details unavailable.)

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Keywords: accent imitation, phonetics, psycholinguistics, speech perception, Laboratory Phonology, Ohio State University, Australian English, cognitive control, dialect, language processing, vowel pronunciation, linguistics