1. Do non-native and unfamiliar accents sound less credible? An examination of the processing fluency hypothesis
- Author
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Wetzel, Mathis, Zufferey, Sandrine, and Gygax, Pascal
- Subjects
Reading fluency -- Influence ,Accents and accentuation -- Varieties ,Truthfulness and falsehood -- Analysis ,Visitors, Foreign -- Acoustic properties ,Psychology and mental health ,Science and technology - Abstract
Many studies have demonstrated that stimuli that are easy to process are generally better evaluated compared to stimuli that are harder to process. It is, however, an open question whether people speaking with a foreign accent are judged to be less truthful compared to native speakers due to the greater difficulty of decoding their speech. In this paper, we provide new data to this debate by comparing the credibility of speakers of French, both with a familiar or unfamiliar native accent, and with a familiar and unfamiliar foreign accent. Our results indicate that native Native-speakers do not evaluate statements uttered with a foreign-accent as less truthful compared to a native one. Psychological area: psycholinguistics Keywords: processing fluency, foreign accent, familiarity effect, credibility, regional accent, Introduction In everyday life, people constantly have to evaluate new information and unfamiliar situations in order to be able to make decisions. According to Oppenheimer (2008), the mechanism of evaluation [...]
- Published
- 2021