Those that struggle when having conversations with people who have strong accents may find that mimicking them helps, according to study findings which may interest those in speech and language therapy jobs.

The study which featured in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, found that imitating someone who has a regional or foreign accent could help to understand them better.

Scientists claim that imitation could be one of the ways our brain helps us understand someone who has an accent different to our own. Patti Adank of the University of Manchester who led the study, told the Daily Mail: "If people are talking to each other, they tend to sort of move their speech toward each other."

However, she says people don't only do this with speech, often imitating a person's body posture too. "People have a tendency to imitate each other in body posture, for instance in the way they cross their arms," she added.

As reported by Science Daily, researchers devised an experiment which tested the effect of imitating an accent on subsequent comprehension of sentences spoken in that accent. The experiment saw Dutch volunteers first tested on how well they understood sentences spoken in an unfamiliar Dutch accent. To ensure that all listeners were unfamiliar with the accent, a new accent was invented for the study in which all the vowels were swapped.

Participants listened to 100 sentences said in the unfamiliar accent. Some were told to repeat the sentence thus imitating the accent, whilst others were told to only listen or to repeat the sentence in their own accent. The rest were told to transcribe the accented sentences as they had heard them.

Those who had imitated the accent understood more than the other people. "When listening to someone who has a really strong accent, if you talked to them in their accent you would obviously understand better," Adank added, though she warned that when imitating some people that they may not think you are being friendly.