If You Must Fake Your Accent. Originate It Well Or Cure Out The Disease

American researchers have found human brains imitate the speech patterns of other people, even complete strangers, without meaning to.

They say a humans want to “bond” with others, even when a voice cannot be heard or, somewhat embarrassingly, even if another person is a foreigner.

Scientists from the University of California, Riverside, found the subconscious copying of an accent comes from an inbuilt urge of the brain to “empathise and affiliate”.

Their findings, reported in the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, concluded this happens when we cannot hear what is being said but are simply lip-reading.

“Humans are incessant imitators,” said Prof Lawrence Rosenblum, a psychologist who led the study:

There have recently, however, been cases of Developmental Foreign Accent Syndrome, in which a child of a certain family simply grows up intoning their own language with a foreign accent. Yes you see a child who have never traveled abroad speaking so fluently in a foreign accent. "We intentionally imitate subtle aspects of each other's mannerisms, postures and facial expressions.

"We also imitate each other's speech patterns, including inflections, talking speed and speaking time.”

He added: "Sometimes we even take on the foreign accent of the person to whom we are talking, leading to embarrassing consequences."

In general Foreign Accent Syndrome seems to be a lucky confluence of biology and sociology. Many people who have strokes have speech problems and, as they recover, speak differently. FAS patients have their brain damage so limited that only the intonation and verbal stresses are affected. When people hear these stresses, they fit them in to the other accents they've heard in their life. 

Of course some people affect a foreign accent consciously in order to gain attention or take on a new and more glamorous identity. Doctors studying FAS screen their patients from the pretenders by looking for consistency. They meet with patients over a series of weeks and have them record a certain passage of text each time. They also have them record different passages, with similar sounds. A person with actual FAS will have consistent speech patterns, saying the vowels and stressing the consonants the same way in different situations. Those who study foreign accents and try to imitate them almost inevitably slip up. FAS is a physiological problem, not a psychological one.

Since FAS presents no great medical problems, it's often hard to get treatment for it. Ideally, the treatment would include doctors looking at both the lesion in the brain and a speech therapist helping a patient train their tongue into obeying them. 

So You know yourselves, its ok to feel that faking your voice can get you where and what you want, the kind of click you want to be with. Just learn it well. Then for those who has this change in the voice as a result of an ailment, do not forget to go for treatment.

have a wonderful weekend.