New research from The Australian National University (ANU) has shown people demonstrate unconscious negative biases when they encounter a person of ethnic appearance or hear a foreign accent. Dr. Ksenia Gnevsheva of the ANU School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics asked research participants to watch videos of ethnically diverse people speaking and rate the level of accent they detected.

She found participants rated a person of Asian appearance as accented, even though a video of them speaking was played to them mute. They also rated a Caucasian-looking person as not at all accented without hearing their audio, when the person was actually a native German speaking English with an accent.

Dr. Gnevsheva wanted to see how accents interacted with ethnicity and she found that when people responded to visual cues only; what a person looks like, they make assumptions about a person’s accent. They rated an Asian person’s accent stronger than that of a Caucasian-looking person’s, without even hearing the audio.

While both Korean and German speakers were rated to have a similar degree of accent in English based on the participant’s listening to the audio-recordings (without seeing them). The ratings changed when the video track was added. When participants both saw and heard the non-native speakers of English, they rated the Asian person with the same level of accent as when there was no video track but rated the German English speaker as “more accented” than when they just heard the audio-recording. This was a new and unexpected finding, and it tells us that people don’t expect to hear an accent from a Caucasian-looking person so they get a surprise when they hear one and rate it as more highly accented. This is an expectation miss-match, in that the person’s voice was not what the hearer expected. This finding also shows that our unconscious biases can work against a large cross-section of society, not just people of ethnic appearance.

Dr. Gnevsheva hopes the research will raise people’s awareness of the inherent biases they have in relation to ethnic appearance and linguistic ability. She suggests that this is linguistic discrimination. People often base hiring and promotion decisions on communicative ability and we have shown that ethnicity affects our perception of communicative ability. She suggested that racial discrimination laws don’t actually cover linguistic discrimination.

Dr. Gnevsheva says linguists (those that research languages) are divided over whether these results are the product of inherent negative biases or due simply to a limited experience and exposure to a diversity of languages. She thinks that as a society and as individuals, we are cautious of things we haven’t experienced or don’t understand, but as they become more common and we begin to see them more frequently, we are able to grow to know, understand and accept diversity and multiculturalism.

Dr. Gnevsheva’s research is published in Linguistics. https://phys.org/news/2018-07-link-ethnicity-bias.html#jCp

Questions for the Discussion Board

1.Dr. Gnevsheva’s research was conducted to seehow accents interact with ethnicity. However, the notion that a person has an accent suggests that the way they speak is different from the ingroup. Speakers’ accents are usually considered an honest signal of group membership in human evolutionary history (Cohen, 2012). In the US, speakers with non-native accents are experiencing fewer employment opportunities, differential employee compensation, lesser housing options, impoverished health care service, lower credibility and discriminatory responses in the courts (Ovalle and Chakraborty, 2013; Deprez-Sims & Morris, 2013; Deprez-Sims & Morris, 2010; Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010).

What happens when you go through a drive-through a fast-food restaurant and you can’t understand what the person at the restaurant is saying. When you get to the window, and you look at them, is there often a miss-match with your expectations? Are you frustrated that they don’t speak the same language as you do?

2.Esseily, Somogyi and Guellai’s (2009) article, “The Relative Importance of Language in Guiding Social Preferences Through Development”, hypothesized that language, unlike other cues, is a marker for cultural affiliation where social partners share the same norms and are knowledgeable. This article focused on the experiences of infants and the language cues they heard, processed and relied on as they learned whom to trust.

Is sharing the same language required for ingroup affiliation? What if you are in an outgroup, but share the same language of the ingroup. Does that make you a part of the ingroup?

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