The Accent Advantage
Thanks to the proliferation of podcasts, audiobooks, and video-hosting sites, listeners are able to enjoy programs presented by people who speak English in a wide variety of ways. As a result, the self-directed learner finds himself able to exploit a phenomenon that, faute de mieux, I have come to call ‘the accent advantage’.
Listening to familiar words and phrases spoken in unfamiliar manners moves them out of the realm of context and into the bailiwick of consciousness, thereby giving us opportunities to pay attention, if only for a fraction of a moment, to expressions that we might otherwise fail to notice.
Fans of John R. Boyd will recognize this process as a refinement of ‘orientation’. In much the same way, people familiar with the work of Iain McGilchrist will see this as an exercise that improves, if only by a little, the ability of each hemisphere of the brain to work in harmony with the other.
Such flashes of awareness add depth to our own appreciation of the baggage born by particular building blocks of communication. Better yet, they help us hear the content in question with fresh ears. Thus, for example, when I listened to a translation of a German book read by a gentleman from Queensland, the Australian accent of the narrator brought into the foreground aspects of the text I had previously taken for granted. (Thank you, Timothy Ferguson. Good on you, Librivox.)
