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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute.

Seeing may be believing. But according to a new study—

-Excuse me, a bathroom?

-Sorry?

-Where, bathroom?

-Boat room? Oh bathroom, on the left.

Where was I? Oh, I was saying that according to a new study, the key to understanding someone with a different accent is to repeat what he says and to approximate the accent. The work appears in the journal Psychological Science.

If you speak to people from different places, you've no doubt encountered a variety of interesting accents.

-It's almost possible to not know what, what they think.

To find out how we can make sense of unfamiliar¹ inflections, psychologists spoke² to volunteers in an accent they'd invented. Some subjects were told to imitate the odd sounds. Others were told to simply listen, or to repeat the sentence in their normal voice. Turns out the mimics³ did better at deciphering the unusual exchange. The scientists say that simply moving your mouth like other folks do allows you to intuit their potentially eccentric speech patterns, and get what they say.

-Now, I understand that you are not making fun. You are to tell what I think.

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Karen Hopkin.