
Originally Posted by
chuckskull
I watched a program about this a while ago. One of the main points they were trying to make, was that it's not only cultural, but physical. After speaking a single language all your life your vocal chords become trained to it and unable to produce certain other sounds and syllables from other languages and so subconsciously replace them with the most similar sounds from their own language, giving what most people perceive as an accent.
They were showing a Japanese school teaching English, with a focus minimizing the accent and they were doing all kinds of vocal exercises, shouting etc to retrain the muscles. Was quite interesting.