A new study by linguists at the Ohio State University and the University of Rochester in the journal Language Variation and Change tested how people reacted to ideologically charged speech. The participants heard different versions of sentences from people with different accents using a slightly different word order. For instance, some heard “Congress is giving too much money to welfare moochers,” while others heard “Congress is giving welfare moochers too much money.”
They were then asked to describe a set of pictures. When participants agreed with the ideology behind the sentence, they were more likely to mirror its structure when describing an image. Those who heard “Congress is giving too much money to welfare moochers” described the (kind of random) image above as “The waitress is giving a banana to the monk,” mimicking the word order of the political sentence. Those who did not agree with the sentiment were less likely to mimic the speaker’s language patterns. The effect remained the same regardless of the speaker’s accent.
via Mental Floss
Image: University of Rochester
