Accent Beliefs Scale (ABS): Scale Development and Validation

Abstract

People’s accents in speech strongly influence how they are perceived by others. The current Accent Beliefs Scale was inspired by work on stigmatization, implicit theories of intelligence, and essentialism. The scale has two dimensions: accent diagnosticity and accent stability. The scale was developed, validated, and applied using a mixed methods approach with a QUAN–qual sequential design. Pretest and Study 1 developed the items, the subscales, and showed that diagnosticity and stability beliefs are independent of each other. Study 2 confirmed the scale’s two-factor structure on a large sample and proved its divergent and convergent validity. Study 3 addressed predictive validity and showed that the more perceivers viewed accents as diagnostic of other traits and the more they believed accents can be changed, the worse they evaluated a nonnative speaker with a strong accent. The developed scale can help understanding and predicting negative reactions to nonnative speakers.

Keywords

nonnative accent language attitudes implicit theories stigma essentialism

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Allport

G. W.

(1954). The nature of prejudice. Oxford, England: Addison-Wesley.

Altemeyer

(1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: University of Manitoba Press.

Bastian

Haslam

(2006). Psychological essentialism and stereotype endorsement. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 228-235. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2005.03.003

Bogardus

E. S.

(1926). Social distance in the city. Proceedings and Publications of the American Sociological Society, 20, 40-46.

Bollen

K. A.

Lennox

(1991). Conventional wisdom on measurement: A structural equation perspective. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 305-314.

Brown

T. A.

(2014). Confirmatory factor analysis for applied research. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Carr

P. B.

Dweck

C. S.

Pauker

(2012). “Prejudiced” behavior without prejudice? Beliefs about the malleability of prejudice affect interracial interactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 452-471. doi:10.1037/a0028849

Cattell

R. B.

(1966). The scree test for the number of factors. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 1, 245-276.

Crandall

C. S.

(1994). Prejudice against fat people: Ideology and self-interest. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 882-894. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.66.5.882

10.

Crandall

C. S.

Moriarty

(1995). Physical illness stigma and social rejection. British Journal of Social Psychology, 34, 67-83. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8309.1995.tb01049.x

11.

Creswell

J. W.

(2013). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. London, England: Sage.

12.

Crocker

Cornwell

Major

(1993). The stigma of overweight: Affective consequences of attributional ambiguity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 60-70. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.64.1.60

13.

Devine

P. G.

Plant

E. A.

Amodio

D. M.

Harmon-Jones

Vance

S. L.

(2002). The regulation of explicit and implicit race bias: The role of motivations to respond without prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 835-848. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.82.5.835

14.

Donnellan

M. B.

Oswald

F. L.

Baird

B. M.

Lucas

R. E.

(2006). The Mini-IPIP scales: Tiny-yet-effective measures of the Big Five factors of personality. Psychological Assessment, 18, 192-203. doi:10.1037/1040-3590.18.2.192

15.

Dovidio

J. F.

Gaertner

S. L.

(2010). Intergroup bias. In Fiske

S. T.

Gilbert

D. T.

Lindzey

(Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1084-1121). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

16.

Dovidio

J. F.

Gluszek

(2012). Accents, nonverbal behavior, and intergroup bias. In Giles

(Ed.), The handbook of intergroup communication (pp. 87-99). New York, NY: Routledge.

17.

Dovidio

J. F.

Gluszek

John

M.-S.

Ditlmann

Lagunes

(2010). Understanding bias toward Latinos: Discrimination, dimensions of difference, and experience of exclusion. Journal of Social Issues, 66, 59-78. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.2009.01633.x

18.

Driscoll

D. L.

Appiah-Yeboah

Salib

Rupert

D. J.

(2007). Merging qualitative and quantitative data in mixed methods research: How to and why not. Ecological and Environmental Anthropology, 3(1), 19-28.

19.

Duckitt

Sibley

C. G.

(2007). Right wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation and the dimensions of generalized prejudice. European Journal of Personality, 21, 113-130. doi:10.1002/per.614

20.

Dunton

B. C.

Fazio

R. H.

(1997). An individual difference measure of motivation to control prejudiced reactions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 316-326. doi:10.1177/0146167297233009

21.

Dweck

C. S.

(1999). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

22.

Dweck

C. S.

Chiu

Hong

(1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments and reactions: A world from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 267-285. doi:10.2307/1448940

23.

Fasoli

Hegarty

Maass

Antonio

(2018). Who wants to sound straight? Sexual majority and minority stereotypes, beliefs and desires about auditory gaydar. Personality and Individual Differences, 130, 59-64. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2018.03.046

24.

Gluszek

(2010). A word worth a thousand pictures: Non-native accents and their strength in perceptions of stigmatization, communication challenges, and social belonging (Doctoral dissertation), Yale University, New Haven, CT.

25.

Gluszek

Dovidio

J. F.

(2010a). Speaking with a nonnative accent: Perceptions of bias, communication difficulties, and belonging in the United States. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29, 224-234. doi:10.1177/0261927X09359590

26.

Gluszek

Dovidio

J. F.

(2010b). The way they speak: A social psychological perspective on the stigma of nonnative accents in communication. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14, 214-237. doi:10.1177/1088868309359288

27.

Gluszek

Hansen

(2013). Language attitudes in the Americas. In Giles

Watson

(Eds.), The social meanings of languages, dialects, and accents: An international perspective (pp. 26-44). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

28.

Halperin

Russell

A. G.

Trzesniewski

K. H.

Gross

J. J.

Dweck

C. S.

(2011). Promoting the Middle East peace process by changing beliefs about group malleability. Science, 333, 1767-1769. doi:10.1126/science.1202925

29.

Hansen

Dovidio

J. F.

(2016). Social dominance orientation, nonnative accents, and hiring recommendations. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, 22, 544-551. doi:10.1037/cdp0000101

30.

Hansen

Dovidio

J. F.

(2018). Beliefs in eliminating accent. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329984341_Beliefs_in_eliminating_accent/link/5c275e9692851c22a34d2175/download

31.

Hansen

Rakić

Steffens

M. C.

(2017). Competent and warm? How mismatching appearance and accent influence first impressions. Experimental Psychology, 64, 27-36. doi:10.1027/1618-3169/a000348

32.

Haslam

Rothschild

Ernst

(2000). Essentialist beliefs about social categories. British Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 113-127. doi:10.1348/014466600164363

33.

Hopkins

D. J.

(2015). The upside of accents: Language, inter-group difference, and attitudes toward immigration. British Journal of Political Science, 45, 531-557. Retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1879965

34.

Kinzler

K. D.

Shutts

Dejesus

Spelke

E. S.

(2009). Accent trumps race in guiding children’s social preferences. Social Cognition, 27, 623-634. doi:10.1521/soco.2009.27.4.623

35.

Lachowicz-Tabaczek

(2004). Potoczne koncepcje świata i natury ludzkiej [Lay theories of the world and human nature]. Gdańsk, Poland: Gdańskie Wydawnictwo Psychologiczne.

36.

Larman

Basili

V. R.

(2003). Iterative and incremental developments: A brief history. Computer, 36(6), 47-56. doi:10.1109/MC.2003.1204375

37.

Lenhard

(2014). Hypothesis tests for comparing correlations. Retrieved from https://www.psychometrica.de/correlation.html

38.

Lev-Ari

Keysar

(2010). Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 1093-1096. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025

39.

Levy

S. R.

Stroessner

S. J.

Dweck

C. S.

(1998). Stereotype formation and endorsement: The role of implicit theories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1421-1436. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1421

40.

Lou

N. M.

Noels

K. A.

(2016). Changing language mindsets: Implications for goal orientations and responses to failure in and outside the second language classroom. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 46, 22-33. doi:10.1016/j.cedpsych.2016.03.004

41.

Lou

N. M.

Noels

K. A.

(2017). Measuring language mindsets and modeling their relations with goal orientations and emotional and behavioral responses in failure situations. Modern Language Journal, 101, 214-243. doi:10.1111/modl.12380

42.

Molden

D. C.

Dweck

C. S.

(2006). Finding “meaning” in psychology: A lay theories approach to self-regulation, social perception, and social development. American Psychologist, 61, 192-203. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.61.3.192

43.

Moyer

(2004). Age, accent and experience in second language acquisition. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

44.

S. H.

(2007). Language-based discrimination: Blatant and subtle forms. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 26, 106-122. doi:10.1177/0261927X07300074

45.

Oppenheimer

D. M.

(2008). The secret life of fluency. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 237-241. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.02.014

46.

Pietraszewski

Schwartz

(2014). Evidence that accent is a dimension of social categorization, not a byproduct of perceptual salience, familiarity, or ease-of-processing. Evolution & Human Behavior, 35, 43-50. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2013.09.006

47.

Pratto

Sidanius

Stallworth

L. M.

Malle

B. F.

(1994). Social dominance orientation: A personality variable predicting social and political attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 741-763. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.67.4.741

48.

Roessel

Schoel

Stahlberg

(2018). What’s in an accent? General spontaneous biases against nonnative accents: An investigation with conceptual and auditory IATs. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48, 535-550. doi:10.1002/ejsp.2339

49.

Rosenberg

(2015). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

50.

Ryan

E. B.

(1983). Social psychological mechanisms underlying native speaker evaluations of non-native speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 5, 148-159. doi:10.1017/S0272263100004824

51.

Scovel

(2000). A critical review of the critical period research. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 20, 213-223. doi:10.1017/S0267190500200135

52.

Stern

West

Jost

Rule

(2013). The politics of gaydar. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104, 520-541. doi:10.1037/a0031187

53.

Świderska

Winiewski

Hansen

(2017). Przemoc jako rozwiązanie? Napływ uchodźców w opiniach Polaków [Violence as a solution? Poles opinions about the refugee influx]. Retrieved from http://cbu.psychologia.pl/uploads/images/foto/Raport_WinSwiHan2016_clean.pdf

54.

Weiner

Perry

R. P.

Magnusson

(1988). An attributional analysis of reactions to stigmas. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 738-748. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.55.5.738

55.

Wertheimer

(1983). Jobs, qualifications, and preferences. Ethics, 94, 99-112. doi:10.1086/292512

56.

Zick

(2011). Intolerance, prejudice and discrimination: A European report. Berlin, Germany: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.39 MB