By admin 
You better stop that awful attempt at a Scottish brogue, mate: a team of researchers has discovered that people in the north of the UK and Ireland are especially good at telling when you’re pretending.
The study surveyed almost 1,000 participants from across Britain and Ireland and found that individuals from Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and North East England were better at identifying imitated native accents than participants from further south. The team’s research is published in today Evolutionary Human Sciences. The new paper was aimed exclusively at people from Britain and Ireland, but it’s a fair warning to those of us in North America about trying those awful accents.
“We first found that people from all groups are better than average at detecting when someone is faking an accent (across the seven accents in Britain and Ireland we assessed),” said Jonathan Goodman, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and corresponding author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “Second, we found that some groups of native speakers are better than others at detecting when someone is faking their own accent.”
The team recorded speakers with accents from North East England, Belfast, Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow, Essex and standard British English. Participants were asked to record themselves saying several test sentences, including “She kicked the goose hard with her foot,” “Jenny told him to face his weight,” “Kit walked across the room,” “Hold this two boiled tea bags,” and “He thought a bath would make him happy.” The sentences contain words that specifically indicate whether the speaker’s accent was authentic or faked.
“We worked with the phonetics lab here in Cambridge to develop sentences that elucidated accent-specific phonemic differences in the pronunciation of specific words,” Goodman said. “For example, for some people the word ‘bad’ rhymes with ‘path’; for others, with ‘mot.’ These differences constitute what we might call accent-specific signals associated with regions of Britain and Ireland.”
The participants’ recordings were played in 2- to 3-second clips for other participants. The team found that participants from Belfast were the best at identifying fake accents, with locals in North East England and Dublin coming in second and third. Listeners from Essex, Bristol and London were the least accurate.
“This story predicts better detection of mimicry among speakers from places with high group tension, such as Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin, and explains why an area like Essex may also have relatively poor detection of mimicry,” the team wrote in the newspaper. “Specifically, speakers of the Essex accent have moved to this area from London over the past 25 years – a stark contrast to speakers from Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin, whose accents have developed over centuries of cultural tension and violence.”
That’s one side of the coin. The other side, the team suggested in the paper, is that people in London and Bristol may be less attuned to specific accents because they are surrounded by a more diverse range of accents every day.
The research is reminiscent of a baffling medical case described last year, in which a man suffering from metastatic prostate cancer “developed an uncontrollable ‘Irish brogue’ accent despite not having an Irish background,” according to research. published in BMJ case reports. That team concluded that the man suffered from foreign accent syndrome, a real phenomenon that causes listeners to perceive changes in a person’s speech as an accent. That work did not indicate how convincing the Irish brogue was.
The recent survey only surveyed participants from Britain and Ireland, but also included Americans – let’s not even pretend to have a decent British or Irish accent. I think we’d all be better off if we didn’t try.