Foreign accent does not influence cognitive judgments

Foreign accent does not influence cognitive judgments Andr´e L. Souza (andre.souza@crdh.concordia.ca) Concordia University, Department of Psychology 7141 Sherbrooke St. W. Montreal, QC H4V 1N3 Canada Arthur B. Markman (markman@psy.utexas.edu) The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Psychology 1 University Station, A8000 Austin, TX 78712 USA Abstract A recent paper by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) reported that the processing fluency associated with non-native speech causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. The authors found that the same trivia statements were rated as less truthful when spoken by a non-native speaker of English. The present pa- per reports the results of three studies that attempted to repli- cate the findings of Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) by focusing on processing fluency manipulations other than accent. Al- though we used virtually the same methodology as Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010), we failed to replicate the key finding that foreign-accented speech is less credible than native-accented speech. The implications of this finding is discussed. Keywords: fluency, foreign accent, credibility. Introduction The U.S. Census Bureau (2010) reported that 38.5 million people (around 12.5% of the nation’s population) have as mother tongue a language other than English. The increasing number of non-native speakers of English in the U.S. sug- gests that a significant amount of daily interactions involve a non-native speaker communicating in English with some sort of foreign accent. The social psychological literature on language attitudes has documented considerable amount of evidence showing that, compared to their nonstandard, accented counterparts, listeners evaluate standard, non-accented speakers more fa- vorably across different traits, such as competence, status, intelligence, confidence, guilt and success (Ryan & Giles, It is not entirely clear which cognitive mechanisms under- lie this phenomenon. There is research suggesting that ac- cent serves as a signal for the speakers’ social group and that any negative attitude towards non-native speakers is caused by in-group biases and not by the accent itself. Alterna- tively, there is research showing an individual’s actions and attitudes towards others are heavily dependent on how that person processes the information provided by them. The sub- jective ease with which individuals process incoming infor- mation influences them in a variety of cognitive tasks and do- mains (Gilbert, 1991; Schwarz, 2004; Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009) such as estimates of familiarity (Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989), clarity (Whittlesea, Jacoby, & Girard, 1990), riskiness (Song & Schwarz, 2009), location and abstractness (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2008), truthfulness (Reber & Schwarz, 1999; Unkelbach, 2007), liking (Winkielman & Cacioppo, 2001) and even confidence (Koriat, 1993). Thus, one plausible hy- pothesis is that the negative impressions and judgments to- wards non-native speakers are triggered by the difficulty as- sociated with processing accented speech. A recent paper by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) directly ex- plored this possibility. They asked native speakers of English to listen to a series of trivia statements such as Ants don’t sleep and then indicate the degree of veracity of each state- ment. Participants listened to statements spoken by both na- tive and non-native speakers of American English. The ac- cented speech varied in terms of the degree: either mildly or heavily accented. They found that the statements spoken by non-native speakers were reliably rated as less truthful com- pared to the same statements spoken by native speakers. The authors argued that their findings could not be ex- plained in terms of stereotypes of prejudice signaled by the accent because participants were told that the non-native speakers were only reciting statements provided by a native speaker, and therefore were not displaying their own knowl- edge. Based on these findings, Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) claimed that people misattribute the processing difficulty as- sociated with non-native accented speech with the level of credibility they attribute to the content of the speech. We began this project with the aim of exploring this is- sue further. The core idea is that if processing fluency influ- ences people’s judgments of the veracity of statements, then other manipulations of the speech signal such as adding back- ground noise would also influence judgments of truth. We hoped to explore this issue both for statements of the kind used by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) as well as other kinds of judgments like consumer preference judgments. To presage our results, though, we were unable to replicate the initial findings. This paper reports results for 3 studies. Study 1 explored the claim that inducing processing difficulty with mecha- nisms other than foreign accent (i.e., white background noise – Study 1a – and speech babble noise – Study 1b) affects judgments of truth. Studies 2 and 3 are attempts to repli- cate the findings of Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010). In Study 2, we asked participants to judge the truthfulness of trivia state- ments spoken by native and non-native speakers of English. In Study 3 we explore whether accent influences participant’s