Thread: Americans with accents judged less credible than native spe

Jul 20, 2010

Study: Americans with accents judged less credible than native speakers

05:16 AM

For the 24.5 million Americans who told the Census Bureau in 2007 that they spoke English less than "very well," it may not be their imagination that people don't take what they say quite as seriously as they do native English speakers. Researchers in Chicago have shown that people with a noticeable accent are considered less credible than those with no accent.

The stronger the accent, the less credible the speaker.

The researchers asked Americans to listen to native and non-native speakers of English making simple statements such as "A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can," and then judge how truthful they were.

To guard against simple prejudice, the listeners were told the information came from a prepared script and wasn't based on the speaker's own knowledge.

Even so, on a scale where 10 was most truthful, native English speakers got a score of 7.5, people with mild accents a score of 6.95 and people with heavy accents a score of 6.84.

The paper is in the current issue of theJournal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"The accent makes it harder for people to understand what the non-native speaker is saying," Boaz Keysar, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and lead author on the paper, said in a statement. "They misattribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements." While research has clearly shown accent affects how a person is perceived, how much having an accent affected a person's credibility hadn't been known, he said.

Even when the participants were told that the test was to determine whether accents influence how truthful people sound, the effect didn't go away. In that case, speakers with mild accents were considered as truthful as native speakers but those with heavy accents were judged less truthful.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... titialskip

The ratio of foreigners to Americans has become toxic, and since most foreigners are here for the sole purpose of providing cheap labor, is it any wonder Americans have a less than charitable opinion of them?