What's in an accent? General spontaneous biases against nonnative accents: An investigation with conceptual and auditory IATs

Hear, hear! A review of accent discrimination at work

Research on diversity in organizations has mostly focused on attributes that rely on visual cues (e.g., gender, race, age) and overlooked an important source of difference that relies on auditory cues - accents. However, workers with non-standard accents (i.e., non-native accents, regional accents) often experience discrimination and negative outcomes at work. We first review prior accent research suggesting that these negative effects can be explained by stereotypes/stigmatization or lower processing fluency. We then identify three emerging topic areas and suggest future research directions in each domain: intersectionality, organizational language policies and practices, and investigation of a greater range of accents and languages.

Judgments of learning in bilinguals: Does studying in a L2 hinder learning monitoring?

Nowadays, use of a second language (L2) has taken a central role in daily activities. There are numerous contexts in which people have to process information, acquire new knowledge, or make decisions via a second language. For example, in academia and higher education, English is commonly used as the language of instruction and communication even though English might not be students' native or first language (L1) and they might not be proficient in it. Such students may face different challenges when studying and learning in L2 relative to contexts in which they study and learn in their L1, and this may affect their metamemory strategies. However, little is yet known about whether metamemory processes undergo significant changes when learning is carried out in L2. The aim of the present study was to investigate the possible consequences on learning derived from studying materials in L2 and, more specifically, to explore whether the interplay between monitoring and control (metamemory processes) changes as a function of the language involved. In three experiments, we explored whether font type (Experiment 1), concreteness (Experiment 2), and relatedness (Experiment 3) affected judgments of learning (JOLs) and memory performance in both L1 and L2. JOLs are considered the result of metacognitive strategies involved in the monitoring of learning and have been reported to vary with the difficulty of the material. The results of this study showed that people were able to monitor their learning in both L1 and L2, even though they judged L2 learning as more difficult than L1. Interestingly, self-perceived difficulty did not hinder learning, and people recognized L2 materials as well or better than L1 materials. We suggest that this might be an example of a desirable difficulty for memory.

A Viewpoint on Accent Services: Framing and Terminology Matter

PURPOSE

The purpose of this article is to offer a contemporary viewpoint on accent services and contend that an equity-minded reframing of accent services in speech-language pathology is long overdue. Such reframing should address directly the use of nonpejorative terminology and the need for nurturing global linguistic diversity and practitioner diversity in speech-language pathology. The authors offer their perspective on affirmative and least-biased accent services, an in-depth scoping review of the literature on accent modification, and discuss using terms that communicate unconditional respect for speaker identity and an understanding of the impact of accent services on accented speakers.

CONCLUSIONS

Given ongoing discussions about the urgent need to diversify the profession of speech-language pathology, critical attention is needed toward existing biases toward accented speakers and how such biases manifest in the way that accent services are provided as well as in how clinicians conceptualize their role in working with accented speakers. The authors conclude with discussing alternate terms and offer recommendations for accent services provided by speech-language pathologists.

I was being sarcastic!: The effect of foreign accent and political ideology on irony (mis)understanding

Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more ecologically-valid stimuli with natural prosodic cues, we found that this effect also applied to ironic criticisms, not just to ironic compliments. English native speakers (N = 96) listened to dialogs between Canadian English speakers and their foreign-accented peers, rating targets on multiple scales (irony, certainty in the speaker's intent, appropriateness, and offensiveness). Generalized additive mixed modelling showed that 1) ironic comments were rated lower for irony when foreign-accented, whereas literal comments were unaffected by accent; 2) the listener's political orientation, but not empathy or need for cognitive closure, modulated irony detection accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic expectations, social distance, cultural stereotypes, and personality differences.

In the Ear of the Listener: The Role of Foreign Accent in Interethnic Friendships and Partnerships

This article examines the association between accented speech and the formation of friendships and partnerships among immigrants and native-born majority residents in Germany. Drawing on the sixth wave of the German extension of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries, we analyze a neglected aspect of language — pronunciation — and find that speaking with a foreign accent is a more important correlate of the incidence of interethnic partnerships than of interethnic friendships. We argue that beyond its primary function of understandability, accented speech possesses socially communicative power. Accent transmits signals of an individual’s foreignness and cultural differences and, thus, becomes an additional marker of social distance. Such signals serve as a greater obstacle to more consequential intimate interethnic relations such as partnerships. Our findings extend the scholarly debate on the role of symbolic boundaries in social interactions between ethnic groups by yet another important boundary maker — accent.

The relationship between implicit intergroup attitudes and beliefs

Intergroup attitudes (evaluations) are generalized valence attributions to social groups (e.g., white-bad/Asian-good), whereas intergroup beliefs (stereotypes) are specific trait attributions to social groups (e.g., white-dumb/Asian-smart). When explicit (self-report) measures are used, attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social group are often related to each other but can also be dissociated. The present work used three approaches (correlational, experimental, and archival) to conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between implicit (indirectly revealed) intergroup attitudes and beliefs. In study 1 (n = 1,942), we found significant correlations and, in some cases, evidence for redundancy, between Implicit Association Tests (IATs) measuring attitudes toward and beliefs about the same social groups (mean r = 0.31, 95% confidence interval: [0.24; 0.39]). In study 2 (n = 383), manipulating attitudes via evaluative conditioning produced parallel changes in belief IATs, demonstrating that implicit attitudes can causally drive implicit beliefs when information about the specific semantic trait is absent. In study 3, we used word embeddings derived from a large corpus of online text to show that the relative distance of 22 social groups from positive vs. negative words (reflecting generalized attitudes) was highly correlated with their distance from warm vs. cold, and even competent vs. incompetent, words (reflecting specific beliefs). Overall, these studies provide convergent evidence for tight connections between implicit attitudes and beliefs, suggesting that the dissociations observed using explicit measures may arise uniquely from deliberate judgment processes.