A thought about accents

[ellarien]

Yes, I'm going to bed soon. (I read the first chapter of Destroyer; it's good!)

But I just had a thought that I'm noting down here for future use, and offering to anyone who might find it useful. When I first moved here, I went through a period of a month or two when I almost completely lost the ability to recognize people by voice; on the phone, I couldn't even reliably tell men from women. My theory was that my voice-recognition circuits simply registered 'American accent' and shut down without doing any further processing. Somewhat later in the acclimation process, I found myself sometimes losing nouns; when the American and British names for a thing differed, I'd temporarily fail to remember either version.

This kind of thing might well be a problem for anyone suddenly dumped in an environment where the ambient language is slightly different from the one they grew up with.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And on the other hand, the rhythms and cadences of speech from home can be so immensely comforting you don't have to actually hear what's going on to be comforted by them. When I lived in California, I would turn on hockey games with the sound turned down so that I couldn't hear the words, just the intonations and patterns. (Of course, I gradually got hooked on hockey that way, smiling fondly and looking up when the familiar voices got excited and then gradually turning up the volume a bit.) I'll bet it's even more so for people who are speaking a different language rather than just a different dialect.