Are regional accents within Ohio noticeable to listeners? An Ohio State University study aimed to answer this question.
Conducted at COSI’s Language Sciences Research Lab, the study analyzed how individuals perceive accents from various parts of Ohio, according to a news release. Findings indicate that, while many Ohioans believe some regions have more pronounced accents, their ability to identify these accents in actual speech is limited.
“People probably don’t learn who has an accent from hearing someone talk and thinking, ‘huh, they sound funny’ — even though sometimes it feels like that’s how we do it,” said Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, the study’s author and an associate professor of linguistics at Ohio State.
The study involved over 1,000 participants, aged 9 and up, primarily from Ohio, who visited the museum. They listened to recordings of speakers from northern, central, and southern Ohio, limited to several individual words, and rated them on a scale from “not at all accented” to “very accented.”
“Americans often listen to vowels to judge how much of an accent someone has,” Campbell-Kibler said.
Participants were also asked to rate how accented they believed speech was in different parts of Ohio, independent of the recordings. The study found that participants perceived southern Ohioans as having the strongest accents, scoring them between 60 and 70 on a 100-point scale. Central Ohioans were seen as having little to no accent, averaging around 20 to 25, while northern Ohio fell in between, at about 50.
Researchers discovered that accent ratings from the recordings did not always align with participants’ assumptions about Ohio accents. “Just because people gave a high rating to the idea that people in southern Ohio have an accent, that doesn’t mean they are good at hearing how actual southern Ohioans pronounce vowels differently,” Campbell-Kibler said.
Published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, the study also highlighted age-related differences in perceptions. Younger participants were less likely to have strong opinions about regional accents in Ohio.
Campbell-Kibler suggested that cultural exposure might shape ideas about accents. “We may hear friends say they have an aunt in Akron who talks funny or hear people on TV or in movies from Alabama or Britain talk differently than we do,” she said. “There’s a lot more we need to learn about how accents are represented cognitively in our brains.”