Mar 18, 2024 07:11 PM
Sounds a bit like "publish or perish" and pre-existing motivation knowing it was going to be stuck with having to magnify (interpret) the faintest signs as an indication of _X_, and then proceeding to do just that.
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Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240...-isolation
EXCERPT: . . . Clark and his colleagues did not notice this at the time. All they knew was that they were taking part in an unusual experiment, which involved tracking their own voices over time. This was done by making 10-minute recordings every few weeks. They would sit in front of a microphone and repeat the same 29 words as they appeared on a computer screen. Food. Coffee. Hid. Airflow. Most were words they used regularly during their day and contained vowel sounds known to differ in English accents.
When the recordings finally got back to a team of phonetics researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in Germany for analysis, they discovered that the pronunciation of some of the words had changed ever so slightly. What they were seeing was the beginning of a new accent emerging.
The Antarctic experiment offered a snapshot of something that has happened innumerable times throughout human history, as groups of people have become cut off from others, leading their accents, dialects and even languages to diverge from each other. On a grand scale, the researchers say it can provide insights into why American and British English has diverged in the way it has.
"We wanted to replicate, as closely as we could, what happened when the Mayflower went to North America and the people on board were isolated for a length of time," says Jonathan Harrington, professor of phonetics and speech processing at Ludwig-Maximillians-University of Munich. "Six months isn't very long, so we saw very, very small changes. But we found some of the vowels had shifted."
One of those changes was the "ou" sound in words such as "flow" and "sew" that shifted towards the front of the vocal tract. They also saw some of the winterers beginning to converge in the way they pronounced three other vowels.
The reason for this shift reveals a possible basic mechanism for how we pick up accents throughout our lives.
"When we speak to each other, we memorise that speech and then that has an influence on our own speech production," says Harrington. In effect, we transmit and infect one another with pronunciations every time we interact with others. Over time, if we have regular and prolonged contact with someone, we can start to pick up their sounds.
For people living in an isolated community – perhaps a village in a remote valley, or a settlement on the other side of an ocean – this would lead to accent drift as quirks or misperceptions of speech become exaggerated. But this can take time as accents are produced by extremely fine control of the vocal organs in order to produce the shifts in sounds such as nasalised vowels that characterise certain accents like American English... (MORE - missing details)
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Isolated for six months, scientists in Antarctica began to develop their own accent
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240...-isolation
EXCERPT: . . . Clark and his colleagues did not notice this at the time. All they knew was that they were taking part in an unusual experiment, which involved tracking their own voices over time. This was done by making 10-minute recordings every few weeks. They would sit in front of a microphone and repeat the same 29 words as they appeared on a computer screen. Food. Coffee. Hid. Airflow. Most were words they used regularly during their day and contained vowel sounds known to differ in English accents.
When the recordings finally got back to a team of phonetics researchers at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in Germany for analysis, they discovered that the pronunciation of some of the words had changed ever so slightly. What they were seeing was the beginning of a new accent emerging.
The Antarctic experiment offered a snapshot of something that has happened innumerable times throughout human history, as groups of people have become cut off from others, leading their accents, dialects and even languages to diverge from each other. On a grand scale, the researchers say it can provide insights into why American and British English has diverged in the way it has.
"We wanted to replicate, as closely as we could, what happened when the Mayflower went to North America and the people on board were isolated for a length of time," says Jonathan Harrington, professor of phonetics and speech processing at Ludwig-Maximillians-University of Munich. "Six months isn't very long, so we saw very, very small changes. But we found some of the vowels had shifted."
One of those changes was the "ou" sound in words such as "flow" and "sew" that shifted towards the front of the vocal tract. They also saw some of the winterers beginning to converge in the way they pronounced three other vowels.
The reason for this shift reveals a possible basic mechanism for how we pick up accents throughout our lives.
"When we speak to each other, we memorise that speech and then that has an influence on our own speech production," says Harrington. In effect, we transmit and infect one another with pronunciations every time we interact with others. Over time, if we have regular and prolonged contact with someone, we can start to pick up their sounds.
For people living in an isolated community – perhaps a village in a remote valley, or a settlement on the other side of an ocean – this would lead to accent drift as quirks or misperceptions of speech become exaggerated. But this can take time as accents are produced by extremely fine control of the vocal organs in order to produce the shifts in sounds such as nasalised vowels that characterise certain accents like American English... (MORE - missing details)