Scientists study how accents change in Big Brother contestants

Accents may vary greatly in daily conversations, especially in those whose manner of speaking is susceptible to changes, say scientists who studied social interaction among contestants of Big Brother, a popular TV reality show in the UK.
The capacity for accent change among adults has been well-documented, over both the short-term (temporarily in the context of a single conversation) and the long-term (slowly evolving based on exposure to other accents over a period of years).
Researchers, including those at McGill University in Canada, looked at the middle period between the short- and long-terms using the unique experimental environment of a reality television programme.

They studied accent dynamics by taking advantage of a "natural experiment": the reality TV show, Big Brother in the UK, whose structure is uniquely suited to investigating how and why an individual's accent changes over the medium term.
In the show contestants live in an isolated house for three months, are continually recorded, and interact with each other constantly, without access to the outside world.
The house is thus a linguistically closed system, where it is possible to both determine the dynamics of contestants' speech from day-to-day and reason about the sources of any observed changes.

Researchers built a dataset of 14.5 hours of speech for 12 contestants from the "diary room" segment of the show, where they are in an isolated room talking to Big Brother.

The team found that accent change over the medium term appear everywhere: large daily fluctuations in each sound variable are the norm, while longer-term change over weeks to months occurs in a minority of cases.
Analysis results, along with previous studies, show that the dynamics of accent change over time within individual speakers-even in settings of intense social contact-are highly complex.
"The complexity of these dynamics rules out any simple path from social interaction to change in a person's accent over their lifetime: despite constant interactions over three months, contestants do not end up all sounding more similar," researchers said.

Instead, the degree of accent change over time can be explained by systematic differences between people and sounds in how subject they are to change over time.
"People differ a lot in how susceptible their accents are to change over months - we can think of "changers" and "non- changers," said Morgan Sonderegger from McGill University.
"This might help explain why some people never 'lose' their accent when they move to a new place, while other people's accents change so completely that people are surprised to learn where they are originally from," he added.
The study was published in the journal Language.