A foreign accent causes doubt

[Joel S. Berson]

I don't understand the differentiation asserted for the "test case"
described below.  How does it eliminate "I hear a Middle Eastern
accent; Arabic people generally have Middle Eastern accents; I
dislike and mistrust Arabic people"?  That is, how does it eliminate prejudice?

>A good test case for this idea would be a speaker who is simply
>delivering a message from a native speaker. If people find the
>message less believable when the messenger has an accent, then the
>judged credibility is impacted by the cognitive fluency associated
>with processing speech, not by prejudice.

Joel

At 2/23/2014 01:26 AM, Tom Zurinskas wrote:
>from http://bit.ly/1fsffdp
>"Lev-Ari and Keysar hypothesized that the difficulty of
>understanding accented speech has a unique effect on a speaker's
>credibility that cannot be attributed to stereotypes about
>foreigners. A good test case for this idea would be a speaker who is
>simply delivering a message from a native speaker. If people find
>the message less believable when the messenger has an accent, then
>the judged credibility is impacted by the cognitive fluency
>associated with processing speech, not by prejudice.
>Lev-Ari and Keysar put this idea to the test in a simple experiment.
>They asked people to judge the truthfulness of trivia statements
>were recited by either native or non-native English speakers.
>(Example: A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.)
>The non-native speakers had mild or heavy Asian, European, or Middle
>Eastern accents. The subjects were told that all the statements had
>been written by the researchers but, still, the subjects tended to
>doubt them more when recited with an accent.
>  In a second experiment, participants were explicitly told that the
> goal of the research was to study how the difficulty of
> understanding people's speech might affect the perceived
> credibility of their statements. Statements were still judged as
> less truthful when spoken in heavy than native accents, although
> participants were able to correct their judgments for mild accents.
>These findings have important implications for how people perceive
>non-native speakers of a language, particularly as mobility
>increases in the modern world, leading millions of people to be
>non-native speakers of the language they use daily. Instead of
>perceiving their speech as harder to understand, natives are prone
>to perceive their statements as less truthful. Consequently accent
>might reduce the credibility of non-native job seekers, court
>eyewitnesses, or college instructors for reasons that have nothing
>to do with xenophobia per se. "
>Tom Zurinskas, Conn 20 yrs, Tenn 3, NJ 33, now Fl 9.
>See how English spelling links to sounds at http://justpaste.it/ayk
>
>
>
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>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org