Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Those accents

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Listeners are less willing believe someone with a non-native accent and their prejudice increases the thicker the accent becomes, communication experts said.
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Researchers believe people associated truthfulness with the ease of understanding a person and accents make that more difficult.
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The implications of the research, by the University of Chicago, could be wide-ranging as millions of people move around the world and communicate daily in a language other than their mother-tongue.
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Dr Lesley Prince, a social psychologist from Birmingham, described it as "inevitable" that accent would be among the factors that people use to judge one another when communicating.
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People will be suspicious of what they don't know.
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If you have difficulty understanding then that creates uncertainty in the mind.
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Uncertainty leads to lack of trust.
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Accent might reduce the credibility of non-native job seekers

Eyewitnesses

Reporters

Or people taking calls in foreign call centers.
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As part of the research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, American participants were asked to judge the truthfulness of trivia statements by native or non-native speakers of English, such as,
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A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can.
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Even though they knew the speakers were reciting from a script, they were less likely to believe what was said by those speaking with a foreign accent.
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Boaz Keysar, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, said:
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The accent makes it harder for people to understand what the non-native speaker is saying.
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They misattribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements.
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Telegraph - Laura Roberts

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