7.27.2010

americans with accents judged less credible than native speakers

Got an accent? There's a good chance you aren't being taken seriously. According to a study recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, people with "a noticeable accent" are considered less credible than those with no accent: Study: Americans with accents judged less credible than native speakers. 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.
Not really surprising, right? While an accent can obviously make it harder for people to understand what you're saying, the study shows that an accent can actually affect one's perceived credibility.

Here's what I'd like to know. If you ran the research again, and broke it down by the origin of each non-native English speaker, I wonder how each would fare on the perceived truthfulness scale. Would a Chinese or Korean accent be judged more or less credible than, say, a German accent? I'm just curious.

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