Question: People from different places have different accents. When the brain hears words spoken differently after moving to a new country or something, I’m guessing it somehow “remembers” the new sounds and then after a while your original accent changes slightly – am I right? If so, then does this mean that sounds stored in your brain from your old accent are replaced completely with the new sounds or are they still there so that if you ever move back to your hometown you will pick up that accent again? Also, which part of the brain is able to recognise sounds - are they part of your memory or what? Sorry if I haven’t explained myself very well.

Tim Fosker answered on 21 Jun 2011:

Hi @morgancope

Thanks for a fantastic question! The short answer is that we don’t really know yet.

You’re right that your brain has to store the new sounds, but it is unlikely that it just ‘forgets’ the old ones – they are probably just modified in some form. Unfortunately we don’t know exactly how the sounds in words are stored. It used to be thought that we just stored the smallest sound units of a language (phonemes, there are about 44 in English) and combined them to make all of the words we wanted. However, there is evidence to suggest we somehow store larger parts of words and sound changes that occur across words. For example “light house-keeper” and “lighthouse keeper” contains the same phonemes, but we use intonation so that we can recognise them as different. Somehow we have to represent these intonation patterns for groups of words.

Even if our brains just represent phonemes, we haven’t yet been able to show how the brain categorises different pronunciations of the same sound as the same. Every time I say the same word the sounds are slightly different, but your brain categorises the sounds as the same so that you hear the same word. In Japanese the sound changes between a ‘r’ sound as in red and a ‘l’ as in lake aren’t represented as a phoneme, so Japanese speakers not exposed to English often confuse words like ‘rice’ and ‘lice’ because their brains categorise the sounds as the same. We know the brain does this categorisation process, we just don’t yet know how.

I hope that helps explain things. Although it posses more questions than it answers – unfortunately we just don’t know the answer yet.

Your right that your brain has to store the new sounds, but it is unlikely that it just ‘forgets’ the old ones – they are probably just modified in some form.