Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility

a r t i c l e i n f o Non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech. We demonstrate that this " processing difficulty " causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. People judged trivia statements such as " Ants don't sleep " as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker. When people were made aware of the source of their difficulty they were able to correct when the accent was mild but not when it was heavy. This effect was not due to stereotypes of prejudice against foreigners because it occurred even though speakers were merely reciting statements provided by a native speaker. Such reduction of credibility may have an insidious impact on millions of people, who routinely communicate in a language which is not their native tongue. People constantly learn new things from a variety of sources. One of the most important and prevalent sources of information is other people (Soll, 1999; Yaniv, 2004). Most people do not know how many hours a night an ant typically sleeps, but if someone tells them that ants don't sleep, they may believe it, even if that person is not a zoologist. But people also doubt and routinely evaluate new information (Ferguson & Zayas, 2009). Such judgments of credibility could depend on how reasonable the information sounds, how credible the source appears how the person says it (e.g., Miller & Hewgill, 1964), how much cognitive capacity is available (e.g., Gilbert, 1991) and so on. Here we focus on how speakers' accent impacts their credibility. Specifically, we investigate the impact of accented speech on the believability of the message. Most non-native speakers have an accent, and it could cause them to seem less credible for two main reasons: (1) The accent serves as a signal, and (2) the accent makes the speech harder to process. There is some evidence for the first reason, but not for the second. Native speakers are very sensitive to foreign accented speech, and are quick to use it as a signal that the speaker is an out-group member. This conjures up stereotypes about outsiders, which promote prejudice that could impact the credibility of the speaker (e.g., Dixon, Mahoney & Cocks, 2002). When a foreign accent acts as a signal, it is the prejudice, not the accent per-se that impacts the credibility of the speaker. In contrast, the difficulty of understanding …