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The Impact of Foreign Accent on Credibility: An Analysis of Cognitive Statement Ratings in a Swiss Context

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Abstract

The present paper reports on a study investigating whether the presence of a foreign accent negatively affects credibility judgments. Previous research suggests that trivia statements recorded by speakers with a foreign accent are judged as less credible than when recorded by native speakers due to increased cognitive demands (Lev-Ari and Keysar in J Exp Soc Psychol 46(6):1093–1096, 2010. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025). In the present study, 194 French- and 183 Swiss-German-speaking participants were asked to judge the truthfulness of 48 trivia statements recorded by speakers with French, Swiss-German, Italian and English accents by means of an online survey. Before submitting the survey, raters were asked to attribute given labels—including adjectives referring to credibility—to a language group aiming to elicit raters’ stereotypes in a direct manner. Although the results of this task indicate that the raters do hold different stereotypes concerning credibility of speech communities, foreign accent does not seem to have an impact on credibility ratings in the Swiss context.

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Notes

  1. Three statements were replaced, which were in my opinion not suitable for my experiment, because they were either not subject to guessing but rather common knowledge in a European context (e.g. “Versailles was an asylum prior to becoming a palace”) or because translating them into German and French would turn out rather odd (“The original name for butterfly was flutterby”). The three statements are marked with an asterisk (*) (cf. statement list on http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1250925).

  2. Note that the context of Swiss-German speaking Switzerland constitutes a complex and particular setting in terms of language variation where a standard variety is used in written and formal contexts and a variety of dialects are used in mainly informal settings (cf. Ferguson 1959 about a discussion on diglossia).

  3. Note that accents were selected that were assumed to be recognizable by the speakers (i.e. Italian, English, French/Swiss-German accents) in order to test whether possible stereotypes about a given language group may have had an impact on the ratings.

  4. In the German survey, 100 % of the statements recited by native (Swiss-) German speakers were evaluated as fully intelligible (5 points on a 5 point Likert Scale), only 52.5 % of the female English speaker, 50 % of the male English speaker’s, 82.5 % of the female French speaker’s, 62.5 % of the male French speaker’s statements, attained full-intelligibility-scores. However, the vast majority of the foreign-accented statements were still within fully intelligible or evaluated as intelligible with the exception of a few words, i.e. the content of the statements was understood. In the French survey, raters considered all statements of French native speakers as fully intelligible. Accented statements were not all considered completely intelligible (i.e. 80 % of the female English speaker, 85 % of the male English speaker, 95 % of the female Swiss-German speaker, 92.5 % of the male Swiss-German speaker, 87.5 % of the female Italian speaker and 92.5 % of the male Italian speaker). As in the German survey, the vast majority was again rated between intelligible with some exceptions. Again, foreign-accented statements seem to be less intelligible overall, but the vast majority seems intelligible.

  5. Even though it is known that quantifying the degree of foreign accent is difficult if not impossible (cf. Ferguson 1959), I included this question in the pilot study to determine—descriptively—whether the degrees of the accents were perceived more or less equally (e.g. the Italian accent should not be much stronger than the English accent).

  6. In the German survey, the ten adjectives referring to “credible” were the followings: “seriös; vertrauenserweckend; glaubwürdig; aufrichtig; zuverlässig; sicher; loyal; ehrlich; gebildet; überzeugend” and the three antonymous with “credible”: “trügerisch; unglaubhaft; unseriös”. In the French survey, these ten labels were the followings: “sérieux; digne de confiance; credible; sincere; fiable; sûr; loyal; honnête; cultivé; convaincant” and the three antonyms: “trompeur; peu credible; douteux”.

  7. Older participants were excluded because it is assumed that they might be less prone to guessing the answer and actually know them in comparison to younger raters with less life experience.

  8. To analyze data with complex and multiple dependencies (e.g. several items per participant, several participants per item), mixed effect models are nowadays acan be regarded as standard measure in psycholinguistic research (Baayen et al. 2008).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the raters and speakers who participated in the experiment. I also thank Raphael Berthele, Jan Vanhove, Raphaël Marguet and Katharina Karges for their encouragements, comments, advice, technical support, corrections and help in data analyses.

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  1. Department of Multilingualism and Foreign Language Teaching, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Ladina Stocker

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Correspondence to Ladina Stocker.

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The procedure involving human participants was in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Stocker, L. The Impact of Foreign Accent on Credibility: An Analysis of Cognitive Statement Ratings in a Swiss Context. J Psycholinguist Res 46, 617–628 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9455-x

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