You well pick apart off that horrendous attempt at a Scots clodhopper , mate : A squad of researchers has found that people in the northern United Kingdom and Ireland are especially expert at telling when you ’re faking it .
The enquiry survey nearly 1,000 player from across the UK and Ireland and found that soul from Ireland , Northern Ireland , Scotland , and northeasterly England were good at identifying mimicked aboriginal accent than participants from far south . The squad ’s inquiry ispublishedtoday inEvolutionary Human Sciences . The newfangled paper focused exclusively on people from the UK and Ireland , but it ’s a bonny warning for those of us in North America about attempting those awful accents .
“ We found first that multitude across group are better than average when detect when someone is faking any emphasis ( across the seven accents in the UK and Ireland we evaluate ) , ” said Jonathan Goodman , a researcher at the University of Cambridge and corresponding author of the paper , in an e-mail to Gizmodo . “ Second , we found that some groups of native talker are expert than others at detecting when someone is faking their own emphasis . ”
A street in Edinburgh, Scotland.Photo: Reinhold Möller
The squad recorded speakers using accents from northeast England , Belfast , Dublin , Bristol , Glasgow , Essex , and stock British English . The participants were asked to commemorate themselves sound out several test sentences , including “ She kicked the goose punishing with her understructure , ” “ Jenny told him to face up to his weight , ” “ Kit strutted across the room , ” “ Hold up these two cook afternoon tea bags , ” and “ He reckon a bath would make him felicitous . ” The sentences include words that are particular ‘ William Tell ’ for whether the speaker unit ’s stress was authentic or spoofed .
“ We worked with the phonetics lab here in Cambridge to develop sentences that tease out accent - specific phonemic differences in pronunciation of specific words , ” Goodman said . “ For example , for some hoi polloi the parole ‘ bath ’ rime with ‘ path ’ ; for others , with ‘ moth . ’ These differences make up what we can call accent - specific signal link up with part across the UK and Ireland . ”
The participants ’ recording were played in 2 to 3 second clips for other participants . The team found that participants from Belfast were the best at key out fake accent mark , with locals in northeast England and Dublin being second- and third - best . Listeners from Essex , Bristol , and London were the least precise .
“ This story both predicts better mimicry detecting among speakers from position with high - between grouping tension , such as Belfast , Glasgow and Dublin , and explicate why an area like Essex may also have relatively poor mimicry espial , ” the team wrote in the paper . “ Specifically , loudspeaker system of the Essex emphasis moved to this area over the preceding 25 years from London — a solid contrast with speakers living in Belfast , Glasgow and Dublin , whose accents evolve over centuries of ethnic tension and wildness . ”
That ’s one side of the coin . The other side , the team suggested in the newspaper , is that people in London and Bristol may be less attuned to specific accents because they are environ by a more diverse raiment of accents on the day - to - sidereal day .
The research brings to beware a baffling aesculapian case described last year , in which a man suffering from metastatic prostate gland Crab developed “ an irrepressible ‘ Irish brogue ’ accent despite no Irish background , ” consort to researchpublishedin BMJ Case Reports . That squad concluded the man lose from foreign accent syndrome , a real thing that do hearer to comprehend changes in a person ’s speech as an speech pattern . That work did not indicate how convincing the Irish clodhopper was .
The late study only surveyed participants from the UK and Ireland , but Americans — allow ’s not even dissemble we do a decent British or Irish accent . I think we ’d all be best off not trying .
accentsHuman evolutionirelandSocietyunited kingdom
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