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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Pity the poor, forlorn foreign graduate teaching assistant at an American university – far from home and family, living on a meager stipend, cramming by day and grading by night, fielding questions from undergraduates like “Do people wear regular clothes in your country?” or “Are any of your relatives terrorists?”
Of the many indignities international students endure, accent discrimination may be the most mortifying, in part because it is still widely accepted in our society. Like skin color or attire, accent is a characteristic we routinely use to identify someone as unfamiliar or foreign. But while most people understand that discrimination based on visual appearance is wrong, bias against foreign speech patterns is not universally recognized as a form of prejudice. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on national origin, but is mum on the subject of accent bias. Moreover, employers who deny jobs to non-native speakers can protect themselves by arguing that a foreign accent impairs communication skills essential to the workplace.
As intuitive as this argument may seem, however, evidence of on-the-job “accent impairment” is scarce. And for all the hue and cry undergraduates have raised over the years about “unintelligible” non-native instructors, numerous studies have failed to detect any significant differences in performance between students taught by native English and non-native instructors. So why do foreign accents still get a bad rap in the ostensibly open-minded oasis of academia and beyond?
New research by University of Chicago psychologists Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar suggests that prejudice is only part of the problem. Non-native accents make speech somewhat more difficult for native speakers to parse and thereby reduces “cognitive fluency” – i.e., the ease with which the brain processes stimuli. And this, they found, causes people to doubt the accuracy of what is said.
Not surprisingly, people prefer stimuli that are easy to process to those that are hard. In recent years, psychologists have explored the surprising extent to which our preference for the easy influences our thinking. For example, studies of stock purchases have shown that shares in companies with names that are easy to pronounce are bought at higher rates than others that are harder to pronounce. Other studies have shown that when people judge a statement’s accuracy, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process -- even totally irrelevant changes like putting it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme -- can alter people’s judgment of its truth, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities.
Lev-Ari and Keysar hypothesized that the difficulty of understanding accented speech has a unique effect on a speaker’s credibility that cannot be attributed to stereotypes about foreigners. A good test case for this idea would be a speaker who is simply delivering a message from a native speaker. If people find the message less believable when the messenger has an accent, then the judged credibility is impacted by the cognitive fluency associated with processing speech, not by prejudice.
Lev-Ari and Keysar put this idea to the test in a simple experiment. They asked people to judge the truthfulness of trivia statements were recited by either native or non-native English speakers. (Example: A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.) The non-native speakers had mild or heavy Asian, European, or Middle Eastern accents. The subjects were told that all the statements had been written by the researchers but, still, the subjects tended to doubt them more when recited with an accent.
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20 Comments
Add CommentIt's "hue and cry", not "hew and cry".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisnot if you accidentally hew your thumb.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot if you hew your thumb. But, quite right. Use a cliche but spell it properly
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh please! Correcting a clich� is like the pot calling the kettle worth two in the buxh.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisROFL
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo all of the previous commentators - what is your native language?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese results would also infer, to a lessor extent, that similar effects would be produced by native English speakers with a locally 'foreign' accent, such as Londoners in New York, New Yorkers in Texas, Texans in New Hampshire, Australians anywhere, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTest without quotes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen asked 'Are any of your relatives terrorists?', reply 'Only my mother-in-law'.
Aha! It works. This scientific method is great!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, but hopefully they'll fix the double quote problem soon: it makes quotations difficult...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the way, submitting a comment doesn't work for me if I've checked the 'Email me when someone responds to this discussion' box...
Well, yesterday I couldn't comment at all. Even though I was duly logged in, when I tried to post a comment the system told me I couldn't post until my account had been checked, or something to that effect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTeething problems, probably.
One of the cognitive side effects of my MS is an decreasing ability to even understand a person with an accent. (I was pretty good at one time.) Now on the telephone I constantly ask them repeat over and over and even spell out the words they are trying to say to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm just some old guy, but I think I should share something with you. For 10 years I had several illnesses, including congestive heart failure and other conditions that required that be on chemo (Interferon) for nearly a year, twice. The interferon produced anemia, reducing my circulatory system's ability to deliver oxygen & nutrients to cells, and to extract cellular waste products. I was extremely weak for extended periods.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn may, 2008 my cardiologist happened to prescribe Lovaza (omega-3-acid ethyl esters) solely to reduce my very unhealthy triglyceride levels. Over the next 2 weeks I suddenly became very interested in astrophysics and other subjects, and began keeping a journal of my thoughts. My intellectual abilities had suddenly and dramatically returned to pre-illness levels. I had been unaware of a cause, but investigating a little I found that there have been claims of non-prescription omega-3 dietary supplements helping intellectual abilities. I think that I had suffered some physiological damage due to my health issues that benefited from the Lovaza treatment. You can find more information at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid
Under the heading 'Psychiatric disorders':
[n−3 fatty acids are thought by some to have membrane-enhancing capabilities in brain cells. One medical explanation is that n−3 fatty acids play a role in the fortification of the myelin sheaths. Not coincidentally, n−3 fatty acids comprise approximately eight percent of the average human brain according to Dr. David Horrobin, a pioneer in fatty acid research. Ralph Holman of the University of Minnesota, another major researcher in studying essential fatty acids, who gave Omega-3 its name, surmised how n−3 components are analogous to the human brain by stating that ''DHA is structure, EPA is function.''
A benefit of n−3 fatty acids is helping the brain to repair damage by promoting neuronal growth. In a six-month study involving people with schizophrenia and Huntington's disease who were treated with E-EPA or a placebo, the placebo group had clearly lost cerebral tissue, while the patients given the supplements had a significant increase of grey and white matter.]
It occurs to me that prescription Lovaza (1-2 grams daily) might offer at least some temporary benefit to you. This is just a guess on my part, but I suggest you discuss it with your doctors. In the worst case I seriously doubt it could harm you, except financially: it can be rather expensive. I can not attest to any benefits from omega-3 food supplements.
jtdwyer,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe answer is yes, as I can attest from my own experience as a linguist, having taught many Australian students, who sometimes asked me how come I still had a German accent, after so many years of living in their country?
When I told them that they, too, had a strong
accent which I sometimes found hard to understand, they were really surprised! It clearly shows that we are at our most 'parochial' ,jingoistic self-centerdness when it comes to our bias for'familiar' sounding lingo;because:
There's no more homely twang than your mother tongue!
Even in multicultural Australia, where SBS Radio and television channels often use BBC or CNN news in their national news, they take the trouble of having the texts read anew by an Australian voice -over!
Our new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is known for her very distinctive ,drawn-out Australian accent, despite the fact that she was not born in Australia, but came from Wales as a four-year old girl. I found that young migrant children, in their effort to get 'accepted' by their peer group, typically tend to adopt the broadest local accent possible. We are at core 'social animals', and nowhere more so than deep down in our own brains' language lab!
Just a little Aussie jab, but I'm not that funny. You probably never heard Merle Haggard sing "I'm Proud To Be An Okie From Muskogee!", but I grew up in Muskogee, Oklahoma, USA & moved around a lot, even Augsberg, Bayern for a while. Anyway, I never learned to talk right, so I just had to fake it wherever I went. I think that gave me a head start on this one - Thanks!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo you remember that Halloween in arabic means "they are sweet." in a full sentence? it is pronounced the same. though cake, which means the same think in arabic and in English, is pronounce diffenrently, same assonances for an old cliche'so in spanish, pastel,(same as cake, before you eat it, obviously, otherwise it will be for France an excrement), so pastel, or pastiglia is a french hue and and italian pill. It evolved after the diaspora, from the aramaic land, and so many example are around, like for example tax, still means time, and we got it as me, is pronounce water in arabic, I in italian, and the same in English. same assonance, different pronounciation, same origin, different evolution of this rhetorical specie.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTrusting and distrusting of someone with an accent, was always endorsed and encouraged in every nationality and society on this planet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe it all started many eons ago, when the Barbarians were invading other lands to robe and destroy small villages and Countries.
This practices were inbreed over many generations, in all the species of humans being (and it appears to be genetically encoded)
It was a bad omen, and it will hunt us all, and fare all of us badly in the future, this is not our faults individually. The faults rest with the warlords and leaders of nations of the past, and with the leaders of murderous Barbarians.
In fact, we could have learnt better things, which would have helped us along the years, things that would benefit us all individually.
a) Always, consider Names persons have, analyse the meaning, (make sure the name they have, is theirs)
b) Consider likes and dislikes, (use in reverse)
c) Remember how trustfully a liar speaks? (Reverse your thought)
In addition, of course, there are millions of proverbs and old sentences, you could consider.
Well, it seems only logical to dislike foreign accents, so probably we'll have to train ourselves to be more tolerant and open-minded, even if we are not biologically equipped to do so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI doubt there's any innate dislike or distrust of "foreign" accents. Many people are actually attracted to foreign sounding (and looking, for that matter) individuals. When I look and listen around myself, I see so many happy mixed couples - mixed in terms of accents, languages, skin color, and ethnicity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have ofen wondered if it is the increase in processing difficulty with new accents combined with the processing difficulty of understanding the difficult material that TAs are presenting that causes the complaints from undergrads. The same undergrads don't seem to complain about accents when they are interacting socially with internationals, and things like the SPEAK Test do not require the raters to understand difficult material while evaluating the accent.
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