The 1982 movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” introduced the world to surfer dude Jeff Spicoli and his laidback lingo. Every time Spicoli appears, he treats the audience to some aaawesomes and duudes.

For people outside of the state, it might seem as if Californians speak like surfer dudes or valley girls -- like, ohmigod. California girls and guys themselves, on the other hand, insist they have no accent at all. Who's right? As it turns out, linguistic researchers aren't even sure: Most existing large-scale linguistic research projects skip the nation's most populous state, as if no one spoke English west of the Mississippi.

“California is very new. Boston, New York, the Northeastern accents are really set in stone because the population has been speaking English [for a long time].  And in California, it is still in the making,” explains Penny Eckhert, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. (Eckhert herself hails from New Jersey, but speaks without the telltale accent.)

Eckert and a team of researchers descended upon the non-costal towns of Redding and Merced in the Central Valley to interview residents and indentify California accents and dialect. After the researchers gathered interviews with as many residents as they can, they apply it to a speech corpus to analyze spoken language.    

Californians may like to brag about having no accent, but Eckert says that isn’t true: “Everybody has an accent. An accent is just a way of pronouncing a language and people notice ones that tend to be associated with a particular place.” (Actually, you can watch Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig and Fred Armisen prove the existence of the California accent -- by mocking it -- in this "Saturday Night Live" sketch.)

She found that many Californians share common traits with people in the Midwest or the South, showing that Dust Bowl migration influenced dialect.

“A pattern that is well-known in the parts of the Midwest and Pennsylvania and Ohio is called the positive anymore, (such as) 'I shop there anymore,'” she says, explaining most people use anymore in a negative construction, such as “I don’t shop there anymore.” 

“We found that all over California and did not expect it.”

She also learned that many Californians use a nasally "a," found often in the Midwest. Once when she was interviewing a student at a Palo Alto high school, he complained the school was too homogenous, noting there weren’t a lot of “blocks.” After a moment, she realized he said "blacks."

Some Californians share commonalities with Southerners, notably the switch between was and were. Many Southerners say, “We was at the store” instead of, “We were at the store," and Californians also sometimes swapped was and were. She also observed that Californians blended pen/pin, with speakers saying both words the same, much like people in the South.

“The diversity of California is something that does not get seen as a distance,” Eckert says. 

In September, the team gathered data in Bakersfield. While a new location for fieldwork hasn’t been identified yet, Eckert plans on studying as many cities as possible.

You can learn more about the project at Stanford's Voices of California project page. 

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• Talking with your hands is innate
• Are some brains better at learning languages?
• Teen can read any word backward. Aohw.

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Good news for those of you who are so self-conscious about gesturing when speaking you issue that “I use my hands when I talk” line: You can stop apologizing. 

As Spencer Kelly, the co-director of Colgate University’s Center for Language and the Brain will tell The Acoustics 2012 Hong Kong scientific conference later today, gesturing is integral to language. In fact, he argues, it’s “innate.”

“Blind people gesture, even if they are blind from birth,” he explained in an interview. “They often gesture even when talking to other blind people. So there is some kind of predisposition to using our hands.”

A recent experiment he conducted shows that gesturing as speech is different from actions upon real objects. It’s more like language.

He placed EEG devices on the heads of subjects to monitor the electricity inside their brains as they viewed videos of people speaking. In some, people used gestures. In others, people took a real action on a real object. For example, in one scene, people pantomimed stirring a cup of coffee, in another, they stirred an actual cup of coffee. Scenes also depicted both gestures, and real use of an object, that were incongruent with the words so that, say, “He found the answer” was accompanied by a gesture indicating stirring something in a cup.

As the subjects viewed the videos, Kelly and colleagues looked for a specific electrical signal that indicates how strongly the brain is integrating one piece of information with another.

The results indicated that test subjects had more difficulty integrating words and real actions, than they did words and gestures. They also had more trouble integrating words with incongruent gestures than they did real actions.

So real actions tended to interfere with understanding speech, while gestures helped, but incongruent gestures interfered with understanding words while there was no difference between the amount of difficulty real actions posed whether they were incongruent or not.

That means, Kelly believes, that the brain views gestures as speech, but actions on objects as unrelated to speech. “That is kind of a controversial theory,” he said, “but my work and that of colleagues interested in testing it shows that gesture is more part of language than actions on objects.”

Gesturing, he thinks, has evolved. “I think it started with concrete interactions with objects,” he explained. “If I wanted to show you how to build a fire, I would bang two rocks together.” Over time, the real action was replaced by symbolic gestures and words. “Language is the ultimate abstraction,” he said. “Gesturing is a sort of middle ground between doing something and talking about something.” 

Other experiments have shown that gestures are interpreted by the auditory cortex of the brain, like speech. And, interestingly, people with Broca’s aphasia, which can be caused by a stroke that damages the frontal gyrus, which pays a role in speech production, also have trouble gesturing.

So gesturing really does appear to be important for making ourselves understood. “The cool thing is,” Kelly said, “that if you’ve not thought about it, and then you start, you see it all the time. In fact, I’m talking to you right now on the phone and I’m gesturing.”

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

Related:

Are some brains better at learning languages?

Teen can say any word backward. How?!

Dyslexics can't ID voices

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Alyssa Kramer can say any word backward.

Assyla Remark nac yas yna drow drawkcacb.

The 14-year-old from Poteau, Okla., can flip words around and spit them back out almost instantly -- it took me, on the other hand, like 45 seconds to just write that sentence backwards. 

Thanks to Alyssa's weird mental rewind button, she's become something of an Internet celebrity -- her YouTube video has gotten more than 1 million hits. 

Here's the video that launched Alyssa to mini-stardom.

OK, fine, she is maybe saying "huh?" to buy time when facing some of the longer words -- kaleidoscope, withdrawal, Lamborghini. But still -- impressive, right? Absolutely. But Andrew Levine can easily pu-eno Alyssa.

Levine, a research professor in philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park, can speak entire sentences backward, in the four languages he knows (that's English, French, German and Italian, if you're interested) and in languages he's unfamiliar with. When asked what's happening in his mind when he speaks in backward gibberish, Levine can't say.

"If this girl is doing it the same way I'm doing it, it's nothing. It's like you're speaking another language," Levine says. "In fact, I think that I am effectively bilingual, in the sense that if you were genuinely bilingual, nothing would be going on in your brain." In other words, Levine doesn't consciously think, "TODAY: Y-A-D-O-T." He's just come to innately understand that TODAY backwards is YADOT, sort of like a person bilingual in Spanish and English knows that the words "today" and "hoy" are different ways of saying the same thing. 

About 30 years ago, Levine experienced a brief, weird brush with fame similar to the one Alyssa's experiencing now: He was a guest on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson and was, he says, "a huge hit in Japan." He was also one of the subjects of a series of studies done back then on backward speech, conducted by Lewis Leavitt and then-graduate student Nelson Cowan.

Leavitt says he was curious whether a knack for reverse speech required an unusually strong memory; instead, they found it seems to require no particular special talents or heightened understanding of the English language. Backward-speakers like Levine seem to have taught themselves to hear each word sound-by-sound (or phoneme-by-phoneme, in academic speak). Alyssa, on the other hand, says she sees the word spelled in her head, and she's able to mentally flip it around and pronounce it.

"Backward speech is one of these things that seems to be an equal opportunity skill," explains Leavitt, who's now professor emeritus of pediatrics at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He illustrates this fact with some brief sketches of a handful of those study participants: a Stanford professor, a woman in the UK's House of Lords, a "German striptease artist." The stripper, incidentally, used to include backward speech in her act, and sent Levine a tape so he could check it out. "The striptease itself wasn't all that interesting, but her facility of backward speech was really quite impressive," Leavitt says.

The point is: Backward speakers come from all sorts of backgrounds, although they do have a few things in common. "They tend to be kids who do very well in school, who are smart and who have a decent-size vocabulary, but they are not necessarily kids who have a spectacular memory," Leavitt says. "So it's a skill that they practice, just like the violin."

Starting at around age 8 and tapering off around 13, kids tend to become interested in playing with language -- they might create their own language or make up one with a friend, or they might play around with backward speech. Most kids move on, but a few stick with it. Around this age, Leavitt explains, kids are getting huge bursts of brain power, while at the same time honing their social skills. That cognitive combo helps explain why this tends to be an age of all sorts of "obsessions," some more useful than others: Justin Bieber, "Twilight," a particular video game. In Alyssa's case, it seems backward speech may have been the thing to take hold.

"It's a combination of new cultural, as well as cognitive, prowess, and that's shown in a lot of their activities. And for some, it's developing certain special interests," Leavitt explains. "If you reflect back on your own childhood, you may even find something you were really into at that time." (A fascinating October episode of "This American Life" explores this idea in greater detail.)

In many cases, the things kids obsess over -- Bieber, backward talk, whatever -- may be helping them figure out where they fit in the world, but most of these esoteric interests aren't exactly going to lead to lucrative career options. Back in the early 1980s, when Levine appeared on TV and in newspapers all across the world, people kept telling him, Get an agent! Start an act!

He stuck with academia.

"It was funny 30 years ago," he remembers, "and if it had led to a career on 'Hollywood Squares' or something, I would've stayed with it." 

Can you (or a friend or family member) klat drawkcab? Brag about it on our Facebook page.

Related:

• Teen has tongue surgery to speak Korean. Huh?
• More college women speak in creaks, thanks to pop stars
• Pahking the cah? Regional accents getting stronger

Although the United States is an international melting pot and the average American makes a dozen moves in a lifetime, regional accents are alive and well. In fact, regional accents are becoming stronger and more different from each other, says William Labov, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, although it's not entirely clear why.

One possibility, says Labov, is that these original sound differences are being exaggerated, like trains moving in opposite directions on two railroad tracks. "The other is that dialect differences have become associated with political differences, so that the Blue States/Red States division comes close to the boundary between the Northern and Midland dialects," he explains.  

Labov says that our dialects change little after age 18 and we tend to retain the accent we grew up with. Young people first match the dialects of their parents, but then they often change to match their peers. These changes, though, are unconscious, he explains.

Linguists say there are about ten major regional accents in the US, such as New England, mid-Atlantic, Inland North, for the cities surrounding the Great Lakes, and the West, the country's newest dialect. While some people sound more regional than others, everyone has an accent to some degree.

Some people are simply better at repressing some aspects of their local speech. The way they talk -- their pronounciation of words (some "r-less" dialects on the East Coast may say "cah" rather than "car") or choice of words ("pail" in the North versus "bucket" in the Midwest) -- adds a local flavor and diversity to speech. But it can also contribute to misunderstandings and confusion (hearing the word "buses" as "bosses").

While some people keep their regional speech styles because it's the hallmark of who they are and a tie to their communities, certain accents may have negative stereotypes or societal prejudices associated with them, says Amee Shah, director of the Research Laboratory in Speech Acoustics & Perception at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Although there's nothing wrong with a regional accent, some people become ashamed or self-conscious of them for either personal or professional reasons and they want to tone them down.

Shah, who has training as a speech-language pathologist and has designed an assessment tool to measure the severity of accented speech, offers "accent modification therapy" to clients. Shah says a strong accent might take six to eight months to modify, a moderate one three or four months, and a light accent a month or two.

"My goal is to help a client modify an accent, not to correct or reduce it," says Shah.

Have you ever misunderstood a regional accent (with humorous results)? Or do you lapse into regional speech patterns when home?

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William B. Plowman / Getty Images file

Competitive Scrabble players are pushing brain boundaries, a new study shows.

A new study confirms what Scrabble players have long suspected: We really are smarter than the rest of you.

Researchers at the University of Calgary have discovered that competitive Scrabble players are able to increase visual word recognition -- the ability to read individual words -- well into adulthood.

“Visual word recognition is a difficult skill to master, and it develops from childhood through adulthood,” study author Ian Hargreaves, a graduate student from the University of Calgary, wrote in an e-mail. “Most of the previous research on word recognition has used adulthood (essentially, undergraduate students, as these are the participants in most research studies) as the model for the end-point of development.”

“Our study helps shine some light on how even in adulthood, visual word recognition is flexible, and can be modified with dedicated training.”

In one of the study’s tasks, research participants were presented with a series of words, oriented both vertically and horizontally. Subject participants were asked to guess which words were valid words, with their responses timed.

Other tasks included creating anagrams (A Manic’s Errant Gag?) and creating words beginning with a certain letter.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Scrabble players bested the control group in every category related to Scrabble.  Hargreaves noted that his group took great pains to make Scrabble experience the independent variable, accounting for a wide variety of factors including age, vocabulary, exposure to printed materials and speed of perceptual processing.

The findings are notable because little research has been done into progress in visual word recognition past early adulthood. (Most studies are completed using the most available of test subjects: undergrads.)  

The game of Scrabble, it appears, can actively improve word recognition in an adult mind. Hargreaves observed study participants of adult ages showing extraordinarily intellectual dexterity in the categories tested.

“I think that it's safe to say that there is plenty of evidence showing that exercising yourself, whether physically or mentally, can carry positive benefits,” Hargreaves added. “What these results suggest is that with dedicated practice, even seemingly basic skills (like deciding if something is a real word or not) can be shaped by experience.”

Hargreaves doesn’t necessarily believe this super-intelligence can be passed on to crossword aficionados and players of Words With Friends.

“The extent to which these Scrabble-specific skills transfer to other areas of reading and memory is something that we hope to continue investigating,” Hargreaves said.

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Recognizing written words is tough enough for people with dyslexia. But a new study suggests the disorder might also make it harder to recognize the voices of people as they speak.

Although dyslexia is regarded as a reading disability, it might be more accurate to think of it as a language disability, the authors say.

People with dyslexia are thought to have difficulty connecting the sound of words with their meaning, so the MIT researchers theorized that their ability to identify speakers’ voices might be impaired. After all, one key component of distinguishing speakers’ voices is how they pronounce words.

To test that hypothesis, they recruited college students with and without dyslexia whose hearing was fine.

The researchers tested their ability to recognize speakers in their native English and in a completely foreign language, Chinese.

“People have shown before that you do better at recognizing voices in a language you know than in a language you don’t know,” says senior author John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist.

If you don’t have dyslexia, that is.

In each language, participants first learned to associate five talkers’ voices with unique cartoon avatars and then were tested on their ability to identify those voices.

So as not to provide any clues that would increase participants’ chances of correctly matching the avatars to the voices, all of the speakers were young men without obvious accents.

When asked to identify the English-speakers, Gabrieli and his coauthors reported July 29 in Science, the people with dyslexia were wrong half the time—much worse than the people who weren’t dyslexic, who missed only 30 percent.

Chinese was another matter. Study participants with dyslexia performed just as poorly when trying to identify the Chinese-speakers as they did with the English-speakers. But this time, the people who weren’t dyslexic missed as many as those with dyslexia. They couldn’t recognize any words, so they couldn’t identify the Chinese speakers on the basis of their pronunciation.

The dyslexic student’s impaired ability to recognize voices was interesting but didn’t present a big problem in their daily lives, Gabrieli says. Oh, sure, he talked to a dyslexic BBC reporter who liked to listen to radio serials and got frustrated trying to figure out which character was speaking. But the woman is a BBC reporter, so she’s not doing too badly.

This line of research could lead to detecting dyslexia in children before they even know how to read, Gabrieli says, noting “there is evidence that early intervention is much more effective than later intervention.”

He and his coathors are now using functional MRI imaging to see whether the brains of people with dyslexia look different that the brains of people without it while trying to name that voice.

How are you at recognizing voices? Can you easily place the celebrity voiceover in a commercial or the latest animated feature?

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