If you haven’t heard Lindsay Lohan’s new accent, go listen right now. It goes up, it goes down. It increases in speed, then slows. It’s difficult to follow, but somehow that makes the whole endeavor of listening bizarrely thrilling. More mysterious still, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what accent it sounds like. Long Island tinged with Irish? Irish with Mediterranean undertones? Mediterranean with a touch of Eastern European? Most oddly of all, though, is that the accent seemed to come out of nowhere.
VF.com writer Richard Lawson first noticed the potentially affected lilt in an interview with a Turkish reporter two weeks prior to the nightclub sound bite that tore through the Internet on Wednesday. Watch that below. The accent really picks up around the three-minute mark.
Psychologists may be able to explain how she came to adopt her new speech pattern in the first place. Wojciech Kulesza, an academic psychologist who studies the social motives behind various forms of verbal mimicry (including accent, tone, rhythm, and more), co-authored a study on what he calls the echo effect, or rather, the phenomenon of repeating the words of conversational partners. He explained to VF.com via e-mail that Lohan is displaying a form of the echo effect in the clips.
“She is making herself as the person with whom she is speaking with,” Kulesza said. “Why do we do it? Liking is not the only goal. Mimicry—imitating behavior—is described as unconscious tendency to create bonds with others, a social glue which bonds us to other people. It seems it is imprinted in our nature.”
In other words, Lohan could be unconsciously attempting to ingratiate herself to the interviewer in hopes of being better understood.
Tanya Chartrand, who co-authored the study that originally named the chameleon effect–the instinctive tendency to mirror behaviors perceived in others—said that she couldn’t identify the accent. “If [Lohan] did have a slight Turkish accent in that interview, it would be quite consistent with the chameleon effect, assuming she wasn’t doing it on purpose and didn’t realize she was doing it,” Chartrand explained in an e-mail to VF.com.
She added, "For instance, a classic example I give is an American talking to a British friend on the phone and then starting to speak themselves with a slight British accent without meaning to or being aware of it." Both Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow took on an English accent while living in England, and even Oprah has been accused of reflexively mimicking her guests’ accents, with some attributing it to the chameleon effect.
When it came to the video of Lohan in the Greek nightclub, Chartrand was even less convinced. The actress-turned-human-rights-activist seemed too conscious of the accent. “Lohan appears very aware of her changing accent and where it comes from, which makes it more of a conscious phenomenon,” Chartrand said. “With non-conscious mimicry, people are usually surprised and even upset when someone points their mimicry out to them.”
Instead, Lohan herself told the Daily Mail that, “It's a mixture of most of the languages I can understand or am trying to learn. I’ve been learning different languages since I was a child. I'm fluent in English and French can understand Russian and am learning Turkish, Italian, and Arabic.”
And so, what may have started as a very human attempt to be understood has crystallized into a full-fledged affected character, and is there anything more true to our girl Linds than that?
