Credibility of native and non-native speakers of English revisited: Do non-native listeners feel the same?

• Authors: Dagmar Hanzlíková , Radek Skarnitzl
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This study reports on research stimulated by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) who showed that native listeners find statements delivered by foreign-accented speakers to be less true than those read by native speakers. Our objective was to replicate the study with non-native listeners to see whether this effect is also relevant in international communication contexts. The same set of statements from the original study was recorded by 6 native and 6 non-native speakers of English. 121 non-native listeners rated the truthfulness of the statements on a 7-point scale. The results of our study tentatively do confirm a negative bias against non-native speakers as perceived by non-native listeners, showing that subconscious attitudes to language varieties are also relevant in communication among non-native speakers.

Keywords

EN

credibility; foreign accent; language attitudes; speech communication; speech perception

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2017
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 285-298

Dates

published

2017-09-30

Contributors

author

Dagmar Hanzlíková

• Charles University

author

Radek Skarnitzl

References

• Bates, Douglas, Maechler, Martin, Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steve. 2015. lme4: Linear Mixed-effects Models Using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1-8. Retrieved from http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4
• Beinhoff, Bettina. 2013. Perceiving Identity Through Accent: Attitudes Towards Non-Native Speakers and Their Accents in English. New York: Peter Lang.
• Cargile, Aaron C. and Giles, Howard. 1998. Language Attitudes Toward Varieties of English: An American‐Japanese Context. Journal of Applied Communication Research 26. 338–356.
• Christiansen, Thomas. 2014. Putting the Accent on Intelligibility: What Constitutes “Good” Pronunciation in the Context of English as a Lingua Franca? A Case Study of Learners of Different LIS. Textus 27. 35–52.
• Council of Europe. 2001. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Crystal, David. 1997. English as a Global Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• De Meo, Anna, Vitale, Marilisa, Pettorino, Massimo and Martin, Philippe. 2011. Acoustic-perceptual credibility correlates of news reading by native and Chinese speakers of Italian. In Proceedings of the 17th ICPhS, 1366–1369.
• Edwards, John. 1999. Refining Our Understanding of Language Attitudes. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18: 101–110.
• Fox, John. 2003. Effect displays in R for Generalised Linear Models. Journal of Statistical Software 8. 1–27.
• Gluszek, Agata and Dovidio, John F. 2010. The Way They Speak: A Social Psychological Perspective On the Stigma of Non-Native Accents in Communication. Personality and Social Psychology Review 14. 214–237.
• Hothorn, Torsten, Bretz, Frank and Westfall, Peter. 2008. Simultaneous Inference in General Parametric Models. Biometrical Journal 50. 346–363.
• Jenkins, Jennifer. 1998. Which Pronunciation Norms and Models for English as an International Language? ELT Journal 52. 119–126.
• Jenkins, Jennifer. 2011. Accommodating (to) ELF in the international university. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 926–936.
• Kalin, Rudolf and Rayko, Donald S. 1978. Discrimination in evaluative judgements against foreign-accented job candidates. Psychological Reports 43: 1203-1209.
• Lev-Ari, Shiri and Keysar, Boaz. 2010. Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46: 1093–1096.
• Munro, M. and Derwing, T. 1995. PROCESSING TIME, ACCENT, and Comprehensibility in the Perception of Native and Foreign-Accented Speech. Language and Speech 38. 289–306.
• Munro, Murray J., Derwing, Tracey M. and Sato, Kyoko. 2006. Salient Accents, Covert Attitudes: Consciousness-Raising for Pre-Service Second Language Teachers. Prospect 21. 67–79.
• Oppenheimer, Daniel M. 2008. The Secret Life of Fluency. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(6). 237–241.
• Pantos, Andrew J. and Perkins, Andrew W. 2013. Measuring Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward Foreign Accented Speech. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 32. 3–20.
• Purnell, Thomas, Idsardi, William, and Baugh, John. 1999. Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18(1). 10–30.
• R Core Team 2017. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing (version 3.3.2). R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org/
• Said, Selim B. 2006. Attitudes Towards Accented Speech: A Comparative Study of Native and Non-Native Speakers of American English. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
• Skarnitzl, Radek, Volín, Jan and Drenková, Leona. 2005. Tangibility of Foreign Accents in Speech: The Case of Czech English. In: Anna Grmelová, Libuše Dušková and Mark Farrell (eds.), 2nd Prague Conference on Linguistics and Literary Studies Proceedings, 11–20. Praha: Faculty of Education, Charles University.
• Souza, André L. and Markman, Arthur B. 2013. Foreign Accent Does Not Influence Cognitive Judgments. In The 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1360–1365. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
• Stocker, Ladina. 2016. The Impact of Foreign Accent on Credibility: An Analysis of Cognitive Statement Ratings in a Swiss Context. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 46 (3). 617–628.
• Szpyra-Kozłowska, Jolanta. 2015. Pronunciation in EFL Instruction: A Research-Based Approach. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
• Trudgill, Peter. 1983. On Dialect. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Volín, Jan, Skarnitzl, Radek and Henderson, Alice (in print). Perceptual Impact of Foreign-Accented Speech. In Jan Volín and Radek Skarnitzl (eds.), Pronunciation of English by Speakers of Other Languages. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/rela-2017-0016