A study from Ohio State University looked at how accents may vary across the Buckeye State.
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The study is part of a long-term project that Ohio State researchers have been conducting at the Language Sciences Research Lab at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), according to a media release.
Researchers asked visitors to the museum to participate in a study about accents. In the end, over 1,100 people aged 9 and up participated.
Participants heard a series of recordings each featuring a speaker saying several words, all with the same vowel in them.
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For example, some people pronounce “pen” so that it sounds to others like “pin.”
Participants rated each speaker on a scale from “not at all accented” to “very accented.”
They listened to accents from people from northern, central, and southern Ohio.
In general, museum visitors thought people from southern Ohio had the strongest accents, according to a media release.
Central Ohio residents didn’t have much of an accent, according to participants.
Northern Ohio scored right in the middle between “not at all accented” and “very accented.”
But researchers said the study left them with more questions.
“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,” Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, author of the study said.
Campbell-Kibler said that may be because we learn about accents culturally.
“We may not be able to identify an accent – we just know something is there because friends are telling stories about it or we hear the characters on TV,” she said.
The full study can be read here.
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