Say It Again? A Study of the Effect of Bilingual Accents

Overview

Objectives/Goals The goal of this project is to single out the main reason why people are less tolerant of bilingual people with foreign accents. When this reason is found, people will be more aware of this and will try to be tolerant of English language learners. The long-term goal is to at least alert most of the U.S. and increase the tolerance for bilingual people. Methods/Materials For this experiment, two people recorded one sales pitch. One speaker had a Chinese accent while the other had a regular American accent. Subjects listened to a speech and said whether or not they would buy from the person and why. There were four groups; 1)Monolingual people listening to the Chinese accented speech 2)Monolingual people listening to the Chinese regular accented speech 3)Bilingual Chinese people listening to the Chinese accented speech 4)Bilingual Chinese people listening to the regular English accented speech. Results The results of this experiment were almost what was hypothesized. The control group, (Monolingual people listening to the regular English accented speech) was unbiased and a little more than half would buy from their salesperson. The bilingual group listening to the Chinese accented speech was unbiased and almost neutral. The monolingual people listening to the Chinese accented speech group's results were prejudiced away from their speaker. The bilingual group that listened to the regular English accent was biased away from their speaker. Conclusions/Discussion The results taken from the experiment conducted showed stereotyping through language and accents. Judging just by their voice, the majority of the monolingual people would buy from a voice that has the same or similar accent as them. Many monolingual people are not used to accents from foreign countries because they live in a predominantly English-speaking community and do not have much exposure to their cultures and languages.

Competition history

• CSEF 2012 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0410

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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