Development
Children are able to take on accents relatively quickly. Children of immigrant families, for example, generally have a more native-like pronunciation than their parents, though both children and parents may have a noticeable non-native accent – however these generally differ: the parents' accent tends to be influenced by the sound system of their native language whilst the child is more inclined to apply hyper-pronunciation resulting from their need to correct their parents' shortcomings in fluency. Accents seem to remain relatively malleable until a person's early twenties, after which a person's accent seems to become more entrenched.
All the same, accents are not fixed even in adulthood. An acoustic analysis by Jonathan Harrington of Elizabeth II's Royal Christmas Messages revealed that the speech patterns of even so conservative a figure as a monarch can continue to change over her lifetime.
Read more about this topic: Accent (linguistics)
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A defective voice will always preclude an artist from achieving the complete development of his art, however intelligent he may be.... The voice is an instrument which the artist must learn to use with suppleness and sureness, as if it were a limb.”
—Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923)
“America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)