Mrs B and I are both military brats. She absorbs accents (not mimic). It takes her a couple of weeks or a few months and she sounds like a local. I don't mimic and I don't absorb accents. But I used to be damned good at detecting regional and often local accents. I suspect that the reasons I'm not as good at it as I once was is that people move so much, TV & radio normalize pronunciation, and my hearing is naturally aging where one loses high pitch. I hear lower frequencies just fine. But little girls are beginning to be hard to understand.