Broadly stated, your accent is the way you sound when you speak.

There are two different kinds of accents. One is “foreign” accent; this 【M1】_________

occurs when a person speaks one language using some of the rules or

sounds of another one. For example, if a person has trouble pronounce 【M2】_________

some of the sounds of a second language he’s learning, he may substitute

with similar sounds that occur in his first language for them. This sounds 【M3】_________

wrong, or “foreign”, to native speakers of the language.

The other kind of accent is simply the way a group of people speak

their native language. This is determined by where they live and what

social groups they belong. People who live in close contact grow to share 【M4】_________

a way of speaking, or accent, which will differentiate from the way 【M5】_________

other groups in other places speak. You may notice that someone has a

Texas accent—for example, particularly even if you’re not from Texas 【M6】_________

yourself. You notice it because it’s different from the way you speak. In

reality, everybody has an accent—in somebody else’s opinion!

People have trouble with sounds don’t exist in the language (or 【M7】_________

languages) that they first learned as a young child. We are born capable

of both producing and perceiving all of the sounds of all human

languages. In infant, a child begins to learn what sounds are important 【M8】_________

in his or her language, and to disregard the rest. By the time you’re one

year old, you will have learned to ignore most distinction among sounds 【M9】_________

that don’t matter in your own language. The older you get, the hard it 【M10】________

becomes to learn the sounds that are part of a different language.

【M9】