Accent Mod Blog

I’ve just finished reading “How We Decide” by Jonah Lehrer. It’s about the neuroscience behind decisions. There is discussion about fMRI scans, what the amygdala does in different situations, and what neurons are up to in the decision-making process. It’s quite interesting, and the examples he uses (while perhaps more interesting to men than women: sports, war, and airplane pilots) give real-life examples of how our brains get us to act.

The section that I found applicable to accent modification (or trying to change any behavior, really) is in the chapter titled “The Brain Is an Argument.” When we’re faced with a message we don’t want to hear, we tend to turn up the static in our minds — we think about other things, we pay attention to everything but the unwanted message. But in order to make a change, we need to minimize that static and listen to the unpleasant message. Here’s a quote, from page 217:

The only way to counteract the bias for certainty is to encourage some inner dissonance. We must force ourselves to think about the information we don’t want to think about, to pay attention to the data that disturbs our entrenched beliefs. When we start censoring our minds, turning off those brain areas that contradict our assumptions, we end up ignoring relevant evidence.

How does this apply to accent modification? My clients come to me because they want to change the way they communicate. But sometimes, when I play their recordings back to them, or ask them to re-view a videotape of themselves, they tune out the evidence that they are pronouncing things incorrectly or using non-standard intonation. They’ve heard themselves a certain way for a very long time, and listening to their own voices as “wrong” disturbs their entrenched beliefs.

Getting clients to be open to novelty (mindfulness principle number one) can be quite a challenge, when what is novel is the idea that their own speech is giving out information that they don’t want to hear.