The Study-Abroad Accent Might Be the Real Deal

Shortly before I started college, I finally wised up to the fact that fluency in my parents’ native language of Mandarin Chinese might be an asset. But after nearly two decades of revolting against my parents’ desperate attempts to keep me in Chinese school, I figured I was toast. Surely, by then, my brain and vocal tract had aged out of the window in which they could easily learn to discern and produce tones. And whatever new vocabulary I tried to pick up would, I figured, be forever tainted with my American accent.

Turns out I was only partly right. We acquire speech most readily in early childhood, when the brain is almost infinitely malleable. And the older we get, the tougher it is to pick up new languages and dialects—to rewireespecially, it seems, when it comes to regional accents.