Development
Children are able to take on accents relatively quickly. Children of immigrant families, for example, generally have a more native-like pronunciation than their parents, though both children and parents may have a noticeable non-native accent – however these generally differ: the parents' accent tends to be influenced by the sound system of their native language whilst the child is more inclined to apply hyper-pronunciation resulting from their need to correct their parents' shortcomings in fluency. Accents seem to remain relatively malleable until a person's early twenties, after which a person's accent seems to become more entrenched.
All the same, accents are not fixed even in adulthood. An acoustic analysis by Jonathan Harrington of Elizabeth II's Royal Christmas Messages revealed that the speech patterns of even so conservative a figure as a monarch can continue to change over her lifetime.
Read more about this topic: Accent (linguistics)
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