Don’t Underestimate the Benefits of Being Misunderstood

Abstract

Being a nonnative speaker of a language poses challenges. Individuals often feel embarrassed by the errors they make when talking in their second language. However, here we report an advantage of being a nonnative speaker: Native speakers give foreign-accented speakers the benefit of the doubt when interpreting their utterances; as a result, apparently implausible utterances are more likely to be interpreted in a plausible way when delivered in a foreign than in a native accent. Across three replicated experiments, we demonstrated that native English speakers are more likely to interpret implausible utterances, such as “the mother gave the candle the daughter,” as similar plausible utterances (“the mother gave the candle to the daughter”) when the speaker has a foreign accent. This result follows from the general model of language interpretation in a noisy channel, under the hypothesis that listeners assume a higher error rate in foreign-accented than in nonaccented speech.