Q. Why do pop music vocalists generally seem to sing without an accent?

A. The apparent presence or absence of an identifiable accent in a vocal performance could have many possible explanations, singing experts have suggested. These include vocal training (or a lack of it), rote learning of sound patterns by a foreign singer, and a conscious or subconscious choice by a singer to adopt or drop an accent.

A once-famous example of an accent change came on the 1947 hit record “Tim-Tay-Shun,” on which the pop vocalist Jo Stafford, using the pseudonym Cinderella G. Stump, parodied the sultry ballad “Temptation” using an exaggerated hillbilly accent. Her usual singing revealed no regional accent.

The phenomenon of “accentless” singing most frequently involves pop vocalists who speak with British or British-influenced accents but sing pop or rock music with American vowel pronunciations. This sounds like an absence of accent to an American listener, and is usually assumed to be intentional.

But a recent small study of New Zealand pop singers compared the sung and spoken pronunciation of key words and found that the singers adopted American pronunciations in singing even when they intended to use their native accents. The researcher suggested the pattern was subconscious, influenced by the singers’ experience of hearing pop music.