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Accent Bias is Pervasive – But is it Discrimination?

Finding an accent difficult to comprehend is not the same thing as discrimination, is it? If you agree, the following studies may make you think again…

A Study to Test the Depth of Accent Discrimination

Graphic depicting accent bias.

In 1992, Donald Rubin wanted to test the results of an earlier experiment which showed students always gave foreign professors with accents poorer ratings. The common assumption amongst his peers was that the cause was poor communication by the lecturers. But Rubin suspected something else was going on.

Rubin proposed that if they held no biases, they should retain the lecture material equally, irrespective of which photo was in front of them.

To test his theory, Rubin gave around 60 undergraduates at the University of Georgia a photo of either a Caucasian or Chinese professor1. In both photos the professors were in similar clothing, with similar hairstyles, and they were photographed in front of an identical backdrop. The only difference between the photos was the face, which indicated ethnicity.

Alongside the photos, Rubin played the clip of a woman from Ohio reading out two articles from The New York Times. Given the students were listening to the exact same voice, Rubin proposed that if they held no biases, they should retain the lecture material equally, irrespective of which photo was in front of them.

But that didn’t happen. Rubin’s hypothesis, that a negative bias against foreign professors existed, appeared to be confirmed.

Can We ‘Hallucinate’ Accents?

When students were asked to recall what they’d learned from the lectures, they stated that due to the ‘more foreign accent’ of the Chinese professor, they had retained less information.

Carina Bauman, a New York University sociolinguist who studies Asian accents, said “Basically, it showed that it’s possible for people to hallucinate a foreign accent”. Of course this is impossible, and so the natural extrapolation is that the students assumed the accent, which they’d likely encountered before from a similar face.

More than 20 years later, Molly Babel, a linguist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada replicated the study2. Two decades later, Babel found the same bias still existed.

It was the internalised biases of the students which led to the poorer ratings for foreign lecturers.

When the professors’ faces were not visible, the students understood them equally well. “It’s only when listeners saw a picture of the Chinese Canadian speaker that their ability to accurately understand them went down”, Babel said.

In other words, it was not the professors’ communication that was the problem, but the internalised biases of the students which led to the poorer ratings for foreign lecturers.

How Can We Explain This Accent Bias?

Both studies indicate that we have an inherent expectation that we’ll be less able to understand foreign speakers, regardless of the clarity of their communication. Some scientists even suggest we preempt less accurate information, too, as evidenced by a 2013 experiment3.

Linguists from Stanford played students a list of words, read out in either a working class New York accent, or a high-prestige British accent. The students were later asked to note down the words from memory.

Students sitting in a row, writing.

When the words were played again, but with one missed off the list, the students had a considerably higher false memory rate for the working class accent. So, when the New Yorker missed a word, the students wrote it down anyway. This occurred less frequently with the British accent, suggesting that the students took the opinion that the Brit intended what they said, while the New Yorker had made an error.

“We expect the speech of non-native speakers to be less reliable, so we are always inferring what they will say,” said Shiri Lev-Ari, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands.

Is it Prejudice – or a Lazy Brain?

While stereotypes linked with different accents may account for the results of these studies, there might be another explanation. According to Lev-Ari, we have ‘lazy’ brains which have a preference for more easily processed information. In this case, voices similar to our own, because they are easier to understand.

Trivia delivered in a foreign accent is less likely to be trusted as a reliable fact.

Lev-Ari conducted a study in 2010 to test this theory4. Native English speakers and English speakers with strong foreign accents were asked to read out a pub-style trivia statement, for example, “A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can”.

Native English speakers were asked to judge the credibility of the statements and, as anticipated, they were more likely to judge statements to be true when they were communicated by a fellow native speaker. Those delivered in a foreign accent were less likely to be trusted as reliable facts.

According to Lev-Ari, “Accents require more cognitive effort to process. If something is easier to understand, we’re more likely to retain it and see it as credible”.

Laziness May Be to Blame – But That Doesn’t Make it Okay

Blaming a lazy brain is the easy – and lazy – excuse for a type of prejudice that is yet to be tackled.

The incomprehension of foreign accents, can itself stem from bias.

Because while it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity, and we have laws in place to this end, according to Bauman “it remains very difficult to prove discrimination on the basis of accent”. If they ever get as far as court, accent discrimination cases “almost universally lose”. That’s because defendants fall back on the argument that ‘the person was just too difficult to understand’ – and they get away with it.

But as we’ve seen in Rubin’s and Babel’s experiments, the incomprehension of foreign accents, can itself stem from bias, rather than poor communication or a true difficulty in understanding.

Might it be that culturally, it remains acceptable to have prejudice against foreign accents? Some argue that it is. But if that’s the case, what can we do about it?

What’s the Answer?

Modern linguists suggest that the best way to eradicate our own internal biases against foreign accents is to expose ourselves to accents that are different to our own. That is, since our biases stem from a preference for the familiar, then we should be aiming to familiarise ourselves with the unfamiliar.

Sources

  1. Rubin, Donald. (1992). Nonlanguage Factors Affecting Undergraduates’ Judgments of Nonnative English-Speaking Teaching Assistants. Research in Higher Education. 33. 511-531. 10.1007/BF00973770.
  2. Babel M, Russell J. Expectations and speech intelligibility. J Acoust Soc Am. 2015 May;137(5):2823-33. doi: 10.1121/1.4919317. PMID: 25994710.
  3. Sumner M, Kataoka R. Effects of phonetically-cued talker variation on semantic encoding. J Acoust Soc Am. 2013 Dec;134(6):EL485. doi: 10.1121/1.4826151. PMID: 25669293.
  4. Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093–1096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025

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