Empathy can improve accent

LONDON - An individual speaking a second language will have a lighter accent if empathy is extended to him or her, according to a new study.

The study was carried out at the University of Haifa (U-H) by Raphiq Ibrahim and Mark Leikin and Zohar Eviatar, psychology professors.

We all know how to identify the average Hebrew speaker trying to speak English: the Israeli accent is an easy give-away. But why is there an accent and what are the factors that make one speaker have a heavier accent than another?

One possibility is based on the cognitive discipline, which suggests that our language system limits the creation of language pronunciations in a non-native language.

“Israel is a perfect lab location for testing the topic of second languages, because of the complex composition of its population,” the study co-authors wrote.

The first stage of the study divided participants (U-H students) into three groups: 20 native Hebrew speakers, 20 Arabic speakers who learned Hebrew at the age of seven to eight and 20 Russian immigrants who learned Hebrew after age 13.

They were tasked with reading out a section from a report in Hebrew, and then to describe - in Hebrew - an image that was shown to them.

The pieces were recorded and divided into two-minute sections. Additionally, the participants filled out a questionnaire that measured empathetic abilities in 29 statements.

The study’s second stage took 20 different native Hebrew speaking participants. They listened to the pieces that had been recorded in the first stage, and rated each piece according to accent ‘heaviness.’

Subsequently, each participant from the first stage was given a score on the weight of his or her accent and another score for level of empathy.

The study revealed that the accent level of Russian immigrants and native Arabic speakers was similar. It also revealed that for the Russian immigrants, there was a direct link between the two measures: the higher the ability to exhibit empathy for the other, the weaker the accent.

The study was published in the International Journal of Bilingualism.