Look at these shapes and consider this question:
Which one is a bouba and which one is a kiki?
This question was asked to American college
students and Tamil speakers in India and more
than 95% of people gave the same response...I
did too. People thought the bouba was soft
and rounded and the kiki was sharp and jagged.
Psychologists call it the bouba/kiki effect.
It’s not baby talk, it shows we can draw
meaning from things without… “meaning”.
And even when we’re talking to someone in
the same language, our body language, tone,
pitch and accent convey information beyond
what we intend.
I think a lot about accents because it seems--
at least to some of YOUR ears --that I have
an accent. I’ve certainly never noticed
it.
Accents develop because people living in close
proximity grow to share a way of speaking
and we have an own-accent bias. Studies have
shown that even one-year-old babies have a
preference for sounds from the language spoken
in their home.
But… why does the English speaking world
have so many accents in the first place?
If England colonised South Africa, Australia,
Canada and the United States there must have
been a point where the British descendants
lost their English accent and developed a
local way of speaking.
Everyone always forgets about New Zealand.
The records are kind of sketchy. The first
settlement in America was in 1607, but the
first voice records we have are from the late
1800s. Somewhere in that time of 200 odd years
across the Atlantic, accents changed. In England
it became fashionable to pronounce a soft
“r”, to have a non-*rhotic accent, so
hard sounds like hahd. And in America they
retained their rhotic accent so hard has
a hard “r”.
Sp it makes sense that accents in countries
colonised later, like Australia, are non-rhotic.
Like this one.
And the way you talk can carry information
about your level of education, ethnicity and
socio-economic status. It’s not always accurate
but it can affect people’s perceptions.
One study at The University of Chicago looked
at the effects that accents have on credibility.
When a person with an accent made a factual
statement, say “A giraffe can go without
water longer than a camel can,” people were
less likely to believe it was true. And the
heavier the accent, the less believable they
were perceived to be.
Another study in the UK found people were
more likely to rate a suspect as guilty if
they had a regional English accent compared
to a London accent.
Come to think of it, a lot of bad guys in
American movies have foreign accents.
"You have 13 hours in which to solve the Labarynth."
"This is just how your father looked before
he died."
"I can't understand a word you said the whole
time."
"I think what you are hearing is my accent."
When we hear our own accents we have a positive-bias
towards the prosody, that’s the rhythm,
stress and intonation of speech. Because you
like how someone talks, when you're processing
what they say your brain regions involved
with emotions are involved. It’s called
affective processing, when you like one thing
and it causes you like another thing even
more without you realising.
While we favour those from our own groups,
with the internet having it’s own social
groups and dialect, what is “our own group”
these days anyway?
With so much ambiguity, it’s almost like
we need an accent-free, universal language.
In case you were wondering a giraffe can last
longer without water than a camel can. Just
trust me.
