The impact of the foreign accent on native speakers social behavior

Abstract

A (foreign) accent is part of the speakes' identity and it is a factor that may guide native listeners to social and linguistic biases. Nevertheless, it is unknown whether theses biases elicited by a foreign accent may impact natives' cognitive processes resulting in a modulation of their social behavior. Three studies have been undertaken to investigate how a foreign accent affects native listeners' social behavior. In Research Article 1 (Bazzi, Brouwer, Planelles Almeida, et al., 2022), we investigated whether a foreign accent affects the decision-making process by analyzing the impact of a foreign accent on the likelihood to respect social norms. Results indicated that, overall, the foreign accent did not directly impact participants' final decisions, but it influenced the decision-making process in everyday social norms. The factors that seemed to underlie this effect were emotionality and language attitudes. In Research Article 2 (Bazzi, Brouwer, & Foucart, 2022), we examined the consequences of processing different degrees of irony on social interactions. Results indicated that the speaker' s identity modulated the degree of perceived irony as well as the responses given to ironic comments. The account proposed is that the expectation one has of a foreign individual's speech affects language processing that leads to misinterpretations. In Research article 3 (submitted), we investigated the impact of a foreign accent on how critiques and praises were felt by native speakers. The results demonstrated that the foreign accent did not modulate how critiques or praises were felt by native speakers. Furthermore, the PhD thesis includes a chapter entitled "Processing of and attitudes towards foreign-accented speech" (to appear). This is an overview directed to students, non-experts in the field and the general public of the most relevant and recent findings on the foreign accent and its consequences on language processing and on language attitudes. To conclude, our aim was to understand the impact of the foreign accent on native speakers' social behavior. The results of the present PhD thesis provided novel insights of how foreign-accented speakers impact the native speaker' s daily life. Furthermore, the insights of this thesis contribute to a better understanding of how native speakers behave among people from different cultures and promote equality among individuals with different linguistic backgrounds, which is crucial in our multilingual world. More research, however, is needed to examine to which extent and in which context the foreign accent is capable to modulate the behavior of native speakers.