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Hugh: Research Shows Accents are Contagious

Written by on January 9, 2023

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Researchers from three universities in Pennsylvania found that people begin to talk like one another when they performed tasks together.

Participants worked together solving puzzles, navigating a virtual world, or clicking words from a list. The more engaging a task was, the more participants experienced “phonetic convergence.”

Changes included vowel length, voice onset time, and voice frequencies.

Some linguists say anticipating an accent can also play a role in phonetic convergence.

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