ACCENTS AND STEREOTYPES

Accents And Stereotypes

Tables of contents

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION1

Background1

Purpose Of The Dissertation6

Aims and Objectives7

Summary of the Methodology7

Ethical Statement7

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW (CONTEXTUAL)9

CHAPTER 3: LITERATURE REVIEW (CONCEPTUAL)17

Accent Prestige Theory: Status and Solidarity Effects18

Social Class, Similarity Effects, and Context20

Accents and Gender23

Accent Effects on Recall and Comprehension26

Accents Fuel Stereotypes and Discrimination27

Speech Accent Effects in Counseling30

CHAPTER 4: METHODOLOGY34

CHAPTER 5: ANALYSIS40

CHAPTER 6: INTERPRETATION43

CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION48

Recommendation and Suggestion53

Limitations56

REFERENCES60

APPENDIX88

Questionnaire88

Accents And Stereotypes Impact On Doing Business

Chapter 1: Introduction

Background

Anyone who has traveled abroad can attest that it can be very difficult to accomplish anything-from obtaining a meal to getting transportation that is headed in the right direction-without being able to communicate with others. Fortunately, many essential concepts can be communicated without spoken language. Expressive behaviors such as facial expressions have the ability to constitute a universal nonverbal language to allow limited nonverbal communication among individuals who cannot communicate verbally.

Recent research suggests, though, that systematic differences in facial expressions may also exist across cultures (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Marsh, Elfenbein, & Ambady, 2003:12). One such type of difference has been termed nonverbal accents. This study aims to replicate the findings of Marsh et al. (2003) regarding accents in a different context and with a different modality. Beyond replication, this research was designed to test for links between the cues that help identify cultural background and stereotypes about cultural groups. Nonverbal behaviors such as facial expressions can serve as a "universal" language (Rosenthal, Hall, DiMatteo, Rogers, & Archer, 2009; Russell, 2004:10). Classic research established that expressions such as happiness, sadness, and anger can be recognized at above-chance accuracy across widely varying cultural groups (Ekman, 2002, 2007; Ekman et al., 2007; Ekman, Sorensen, & Friesen, 2009; Izard, 2001:12-20), and this degree of universality has led theorists to hypothesize that these basic expressions are innate and biologically driven. Contradicting a pure innateness hypothesis, however, is evidence that recognition accuracy decreases with increasing cultural and physical distance between the expresser's and perceiver's cultures (e.g., Camras, Oster, Campos, Miyake, & Bradshaw, 2007; Ekman, 2002, 2007; Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Mesquita, Frijda, & Scherer, 2007; Russell, 2004:52). Recently, Marsh et al. (2003) argued that the universal language of facial expression may be modified by different "accents" across different cultural groups.

In linguistics, the word accent denotes characteristic differences in pronunciation used by subsets of speakers of a language. Speakers' accents come to resemble the accent of speakers around them (Baron-Cohen & Staunton, 2004; Munro, Derwing, & Flege, 2009:12-20).

Two consequences result from the development of verbal accents. The first is that understanding speakers using unfamiliar accents may be more difficult (Munro & Derwing, 2005:47). The second is that the spoken accents can be used to deduce the nationality of the speaker (Ladegaard, 2008:12). This paper focuses on the second of these consequences.

Corresponding to the linguistic theory of verbal accents, Marsh et al. (2003) found that nonverbal accents could also be used to deduce the nationality of an expresser. American participants made judgments regarding the nationality of Japanese and Japanese American individuals showing neutral and emotional ...