Explain, using your understanding of phonology, what happens if you believe someone has an accent.?

Question

Explain, using your understanding of phonology, what happens if you believe someone has an accent.

Answer 1

Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages.  

Phonology analyzes the sound patterns of a particular language by determining which phonetic sounds are significant, and explaining how these sounds are interpreted by the native speaker.

One might consider the following factors when determining a person's heritage or whether they possess an accent:

Speaker's Mind → Speaker's Mouth → Listener's Ear → Listener's Mind

The predictable aspects of pronunciation (here [nasal] in vowels) are added by the rules in the phonology of the language. The rules of pronunciation determine the variants in speech sounds. This particular rule makes one sound (the vowel) more similar to an adjacent sound (the following nasal consonant), by making the vowel [nasal]. Rules that make sounds more similar are called assimilation rules. Rules that make sounds less similar are called dissimilation rules. Assimilation rules are much more common than dissimilation rules.

How a person makes sounds through voice, pitch, nasals, etc. all depict their language peculiararities and help determine their background.  

As for the "philosophy" of what "happens" if you believe someone has an accent, it is purely stereotype in action, in my humble opinion.  A child born in China can have a British accent if brought up in that environment, or they can sound distinctly Chinese if reared in China with Chinese speaking parents.