RESEARCH carried out by the University of Cambridge has revealed that Irish people are among the best at detecting people using fake accents.
People from Dublin and Belfast, as well as from Glasgow and the north-east of England, are better at detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London, Essex and Bristol, reports the university.
The study argues that greater social cohesion in Belfast, Dublin, Glasgow and the north-east may have resulted in a more prominent fear of cultural dilution by outsiders, thereby encouraging the development of improved accent recognition and mimicry detection.
"Cultural, political, or even violent conflict are likely to encourage people to strengthen their accents as they try to maintain social cohesion through cultural homogeneity," said author Dr Jonathan R. Goodman from Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies.
"Even relatively mild tension, for example the intrusion of tourists in the summer, could have this effect."
Accents for social identity
The study, published in Evolutionary Human Sciences, found that participants from Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and the north-east of England had a success range of 65-85 per cent when deciding whether short recordings of their native accent were real or fake.
For Essex, London and Bristol, success ranged from just over 50 per cent to 65-75 per cent.
The researchers argue that the accents of speakers from Belfast, Glasgow, Dublin, and north-east have culturally evolved over the past several centuries, during which there have been multiple cases of between-group cultural tension, particularly involving the cultural group making up south-east England, above all London.
This, they suggest, probably caused individuals from areas in Ireland and the northern regions of the UK to place emphasis on their accents as signals of social identity.
"I'm interested in the role played by trust in society and how trust forms," Dr Goodman told the University of Cambridge.
"One of the first judgments a person will make about another person, and when deciding whether to trust them, is how they speak.
"How humans learn to trust another person who may be an interloper has been incredibly important over our evolutionary history and it remains critical today."
Research
The team initially recruited around 50 participants who spoke in the accents of north-east England, Belfast, Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow, Essex and Received Pronunciation — commonly understood as standard British English.
They recorded themselves reading given sentences in their natural accent, then mimicked sentences in the other six accents.
Participants were then asked to listen to recordings of their own accents made by other participants — six mimics and six genuine speakers — and asked to determine which were real.
In a second phase, the researchers recruited over 900 participants from the UK and Ireland, collecting 11,672 responses.
See More: Irish Accent, University Of Cambridge.
