by Regina Kim
People learn new information from a variety of sources, including from conversing with one another.  How credible the new information is to the listener often depends on how reasonable the information sounds, but also the credibility of the person who says it. A person’s credibility may in turn be related to how they say it.  In order to explore if speaking with an accent impacts one’s credibility, Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) conducted two studies examining how trivia statements such as “Ants don’t sleep” are evaluated when spoken with a nonnative accent versus a native accent. Because people are unlikely to know for sure whether these statements were true, they were likely to guess how credible they were based on the credibility of the speaker. Native speakers who listened to the trivia statements judged the statements to be less true when spoken with a nonnative accent.  Moreover, the more the listener had difficulty understanding the statements because of the nonnative accent, the less they believed the statements were credible, suggesting that accent strength also reduces the credibility of what is being said.
When people listen to accented speech, the difficulty of understanding the nonnative accent make the statements more difficult to understand.  However, instead of perceiving statements as more difficult to understand, people perceive the statements as less truthful.  Consequently, nonnative speakers, especially when they speak with a pronounced accent are seen as less credible.
Trust and credibility play an integral role in teams and organizations, and distrust can be a powerful source of tension, conflict, and competition between individuals in organizations.  As such, it is important for us to be aware of our biases against accented speech and be mindful that the processing difficulty of statements spoken with an accent does not, and should not imply that nonnative speakers are less credible.
  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, 1093-1096. Creative Commons License xenophobia on parade by I. McBee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.