Here’s one of those research findings I love to stumble across. It turns out that if you are dealing with someone who speaks your language with an accent, you understand them better if you try to mimic that accent. As reported in the Telegraph, researchers from the University of Manchester and Holland’s Radboud University conducted an experiment in which people were evaluated on their ability to understand sentences spoken with an unfamiliar accent. Prior to the test, they were exposed to the accent in sample recordings, but only some were instructed to imitate the samples they heard. The finding was clear: those who had imitated the accent understood the material they were subsequently tested on much better. (The research was published in the journal Psychological Science.)