But I’m not sure that divorcing an actor’s face from their performance is going to become a common thing any time soon, simply because of cost. That stuff is expensive; I think we’re a long way from the day when it’s going to be worth the cost, without extenuating circumstances (e.g. playing a non-human like Gollum, aging a character substantially as in Beowulf). Cheaper to just hire somebody who looks right in the first place.

As for what I look forward to most, it’s already here, but not in the U.S.: toric ICLs, which can be used to permanently correct vision that’s too bad for lasik. Normal ICLs are approved, but I need the toric version (for astigmatism), and the FDA hasn’t given them the thumbs-up yet.

And, yes, I can acknowledge that Michiganians (Lower Peninsula, specifically) tend to define our speech as “non-accented.” I may be slightly more aware than average, but that’s just because I spent some formative time out of the country and got the “Midwestern ‘a’” wiped, but then it came back with a vengeance during high school.

The Preston study is described confusingly. First of all, “cat” and “cot” aren’t homophones in anyone’s pronunciation of English, anywhere. (I feel almost comfortable stating that totally categorically.) The deal with the NCS is that merely that NCS speakers pronounce “cot” in a way that’s more like the non-NCS “cat” than non-NCS speakers do (and maybe more like the non-NCS “cat” than like the non-NCS “cot”). However, the NCS “cat” has already moved out of the way and is less similar to the non-NCS “cat”.

If I recall correctly the way the Preston study worked, what happened was that NCS listeners, hearing an NCS speaker pronounce an NCS “cot”, which should have been easy for them to understand since it was a speaker of their own dialect, still some of the time interpreted it as “cat” because the NCS “cot” is similar to the non-NCS “cot”—i.e., NCS listeners sometimes interpret local speakers as if they *expected* them not to have the NCS.

The Niedzelski study is the flip side of the same situation: having heard a speaker they were told was from Michigan, saying a word they were told was “bag”, the NCS listeners described the pronunciation after the fact as not having sounded like the NCS “bag”, even though it did—again, because the NCS listeners expect local speakers to *not* have a marked accent.

And the general point that Inland North Speakers generally are unaware (unlike Boston, New York, and Southern speakers) that they have a distinctive accent is certainly true. (You yourself are a case in point, I think!) Another well-known study by Preston asked respondents from a couple different geographical areas to rate each of the 50 states for speech correctness/standardness—and respondents from Michigan consistently rated themselves as the highest-ranked state for correctness (which is not something respondents from, say, Alabama did).

Cf. also my Minnesota Public Radio interview:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/08/29/daily-circuit-great-lakes-dialect/