Are accents physical or mental?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t think there’s an incontestably correct answer to this question which is why I put it here and not in General Questions.

Anyway, suppose the science-fiction scenario comes to pass and it becomes possible to place a persons conciousness in a different body (full brain transplant, downloading their conciousness, the method isn’t really important) would the person in their new body still have their original accent or not?

Yeah, that made sense when I was thinking about it but not so much when written down…hope the question is understandable enough!

p.s. the above post should be read while affecting a deep Northern Irish accent with its dulcet tones, flavour of lonely country lanes, shadowed secretive meetings, with the merest hint of danger and of dark mysterious deeds

2

Well, certainly the transplanted self’s voice will be different. I imagine the voice will match that of the poor bastard whose self got evicted from this body in question. The physiology of the body will affect the voice.

Another point I feel confident stating as “certainly”: the speech patterns will match those of the transplanted self’s original natural speech patterns. Speech patterns come very much from personality and cultural input. Following my certainty on the matter of speech patterns, I think the same would apply to accents. This body/consciousness will speak with the original accent of the transplanted self.

The above reasoning all assumes we’re transplanting a human self into a human body. If we’re transplanting a human self into a dog’s body then all bets are off.
Allow me to piggy-back a related question onto your original premise:
[ul][li]Bobby’s conscious self is transplanted into Giovani’s body.[/li][li]Giovani’s conscious self is discarded/forced out- no Steve Martin/ Lilly Tomlin scenario.[/li][li]Giovani was a great singer.[/li][li]Bobby could never carry a tune.[/li][/ul]
CAN BOBBY NOW SING USING GIOVANI’S BODY???

There very much is a physiological aspect to the ability to sing, but it also has to do with a personal musicality.
So, a bit more murky a question than the accent question I think.

3

The mouth & tongue are full of muscles that are trained for a certain accent. Without training those muscles to do particular things you cannot do them. People need to be trained to make the English “th”-sounds, to roll their "r"s or not roll them. Really to make just any sound.

I had to train my SO not to roll his r in German by literally making him hold the front of his tongue so he would only vibrate the back. It looked pretty funny, but he can do it now.

In the same way you train your ear for certain sounds when you are young, so it is more difficult to distinguish certain sounds you are not used to hearing at a later age. This you might call “mental”, and would probably be transplanted along with the brain (obviously it’s not the actual ear).

4

I don’t know anything about brain transplants, but I do know that accents can be produced by physical changes in the brain.

Oliver Sacks writes about several people in one of his many books (sorry, at work, can’t look up which) that have seizures or accidents or brain trauma of some type, and when they recover, they speak in a different accent than they did before.

5

Short answer: both.

As gracer says, when we speak, we move our lips, tongue, face, and jaw - not to mention our glottis, vocal folds, and diaphragm - in very finely tuned synchronization. All of these things go into producing our particular accent. Beginning the moment we are born, we begin to distinguish the catalog of sounds that will make up our accent, and we teach our muscles to perform the movements that produce these sounds. And we learn to make these movements, some of which are incredibly small, in relation to the architecture of our own mouths and throats. This process can take many years, and sometimes, it’s never completely successful: think about all the kids who still have trouble pronouncing “r”, “l”, or “th” at 7 or 8 years old, and all the adults who never do learn to roll their "r"s (or refrain from rolling them), or who speak with a lisp.

In this scenario, then, let’s say the transplanted consciousness (Mr. T) wants to produce an “r”. This desire triggers various nerve impulses in the brain that translate into something like, “produce energy to contract styloglossus X millimeters, contract obicularis oris Y millimeters at 90 degrees and 270 degrees”, and so on. (And as Lasciel points out, this is presuming that the new brain is capable of producing identical impulses to the old one, which is indeed highly unlikely.) The muscles will then try to perform these movements. But they will not be developed to the same degree as those in Mr. T’s original body, so some will contract less, or more, and some may not move at all. Further, even if all the muscles did move exactly as they did in Mr. T’s original body, his new mouth is a different size and shape. So a contraction of those muscles should have made the sides of his tongue press against his teeth at a certain position with a certain amount of force, but now, the position is different, or the force is greater, or perhaps the tongue fails to meet the teeth at all. The result might be a completely different sound entirely - a “d”, or an “s”, or a “u”.

So I imagine that the “accent” that comes out would be neither the accent of the original owner of the body, nor that of Mr. T. Instead, it will be a very muddled version of Mr. T’s, as though he’s trying to do ventriloquism with a mouthful of Novocaine and a brand-new retainer. And it will be many years before he learns to produce his original accent again, if ever.

6

A lot depends on what is called a brain transplant. A recent thread addressed the issue of the brain extending out through the entire nervous system. Even going that far and exchanging the entire brain and nervous system, and maybe the eyes and ears, taste buds and olfactory organs, the brain still ends up in a new physical body which it has to become used to. I’d say the accent largely resides in the brain, but how it manifests would change with the physical changes in the host body. But the intent of how a word is pronounced wouldn’t change.

7

Right. These sort of hypotheticals are predicated on a concept of either a “ghost in the machine” or at least of a sharp divide between where mind resides and the rest of the body.

That said of the mix of factors that Heart of Dorkness references, my WAG is that the more peripheral changes are minor and quickly retrained. The more central changes of how speech is heard and produced, the way in which the inputs are perceived and the outputs produced will be greater. Accents become fairly fixed not because the oral structures lack sufficient plasticity as we age but becaue the brain is past its period of plasticity.

8

Thanks for the answers everyone! Very interesting.

9

There may be speech impediments which change from one body to another: those aren’t part of a person’s accent, but they’re certainly part of a person’s speech patterns. And whether we’re talking “instant mind swap” or brain transplant, there will be a recovery time and a risk that speech or any other function will never be fully recovered.

10

A tiny hijack, then - how is it someone like me can have many different accents in a lifetime? I had a full on Southern accent as a child, moved to California at 10 and picked up a standard California accent, moved back to Mississippi and that accent came back (16), back to Cali and that accent came back (21), then to Michigan and picked up a strong upper midwestern thing going on (ya, oh ya?) at 26, then to Nevada where I reaquired my Cali accent (29 or 30, I forget which) and then finally to Australia at 33, where I am now at 44 and I have a near perfect Aussie accent, or at least good enough that people express surprise when I tell them I’m American. In fact, I have a Victorian thing going on (castle instead of cah-stle) because my husband is Victorian and that’s what I hear most, despite the fact we are in New South Wales.

Note that I don’t do this on purpose and I appear to be somewhat of an accent chamelion, in that I pick up whatever I’m hearing (and this happens in my head, if I read an author with a distinctive ‘voice’ I’m soon thinking in that voice for a while. )

So if my brain is past its plasticity period, how did this happen, and why couldn’t it happen for our hypothetical brain transplantee?

11

A past thread on accent acquisition. The short version is that the period of plasticity peters off some time in the second decade in most cases. Your exposure to different accents during that decade was within that window.

12

So I’ve just had some fun trying to read up some on how rigid/flexible that period of neuroplasticity is. The behavioral studies show that it varies depending to some degree on what aspect is being measured, how much and what sort of exposure to the other accent the individual has had in earlier years, and which particular accents were native versus new to attempt to be acquired. Some ongoing debate in journals with point counterpoints over how much plasticity remains how long.

This article though seems the most through and addresses the questions of neural plasticity most directly. Lots of detail there with a fair amount of reference to current functional neuroimaging data, but this into bit captures the apparent current bottom lines:

13

Thanks, DSeid. :slight_smile:

14

No not possible here why .The accent and sounds you make when you speak is determine by your mouth ,nose and vocal cords and everyone is different.So when you say hello it come out strange it will take time to get use to how make the sounds and try to do accent that close to what you had.

And your girlfriend will say who are you ? You don’t sound like the guy I was with .:o