Mimicked accents — Do speakers have similar cognitive prototypes?

There are several possible situations in which perpetrators might want to disguise their voices in order to avoid identification and to deflect the search for them to another person or group of individuals. One possible manner that can be used for voice disguise is the adoption of another accent. This paper examines the mimicking of the British-English Swedish accent, that is mimicking of the Swedish spoken by native British English speakers, by native Swedish speakers. It was found that the speakers selected similar and prominent features of the British-English Swedish accent in their first spontaneous recordings, and that the mimicked accent was impacted upon at word and suprasegmental level after having listened to a native speaker.