We Are What We Say: Accent-Inclusive Sociopragmatic Research

Dear Colleagues,

For many decades, speakers’ utterances have been examined under various sub-fields of linguistics. These different disciplines brought their perspectives on understanding variation in spoken language. Although it has received a considerable amount of attention, there is one area that still poses challenges to understanding everyday communications: accents. While every person has their own unique accent, accents have been historically used to make inferences regarding a speaker’s identity (Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010; Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010; Kinzler et al., 2007; Hanulíková et al., 2012; McGowan, 2015; Babel & Russell, 2015; Kutlu, 2023). These inferences are often tied to speaker’s language background, race and ethnicity along with various other social categories. However, the interpretation of an accent is also tied to a listener’s background (Kutlu et al., 2022a), showing the dynamic negotiations that happen between a speaker and a listener in everyday conversations.

Accents have been shown to have effects on overall linguistic processes (Floccia et al., 2006; Grey et al., 2017; Porretta et al., 2016). For instance, listeners have been found to have difficulties in processing novel accents (Begus et al., 2016; Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2012; Van Engen & Peelle; 2014), but when trained, the processing difficulties have reduced (Baese-Berk et al., 2013). Listeners who engage with different accents or who live in more integrated bilingual contexts have also been shown to have reduced processing difficulties compared to those who have less exposure to different accents and live in less integrated bilingual contexts (Kutlu et al., 2022b).

While the processing of accents varies depending on one’s exposure to the accent, a large body of literature has shown that both children and adults were found to hold negative social attitudes toward and discriminate against unfamiliar accents (Kinzler et al., 2009; Yi et al., 2013). Yi and colleagues (2013) show that visual cues to a speaker’s racialized group membership can influence how accented and intelligible they are perceived to be. Speakers whose accents are perceived as foreign were also found to be less credible and more vague (Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010; Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2012).

It is therefore unclear how encountering unfamiliar accents affects sentence interpretation, and more specifically sociopragmatic inferences. It is widely acknowledged that the overall meaning conveyed by linguistic utterances includes information that goes beyond the conventional meaning of the words, and must be inferred on the basis of the context. Thus, when engaged in a conversation, listeners often have to derive pragmatic inferences; inferences that allow them to fine tune the message conveyed by an utterance by enriching its literal meaning via reasoning about the interlocutor’s communicative intentions. By contrast, listeners also extract social inferences that allow them to evaluate and form impressions about the speakers’ social and personal qualities (e.g., demographic background, ideological orientation and personality traits) based on how they speak. While the two types of inferences are crucially different, the value of exploring the interaction between these domains of signification, and specifically how interlocutors triangulate between these different streams of information to compute an overall message, has been at the forefront of recent research (Beltrama & Schwarz, 2023; Ip & Papafragou, 2023).

A comprehensive understanding of multilingual language processes requires an in-depth examination of accents that emerge as a result of multilingual spoken instances (i.e., accents that are deemed to be foreign to listeners). This Special Issue aims to collect original research pieces that examine the dynamics of accents from a sociopragmatic perspective. The empirical focus can be on any language, including but not limited to regional vs. national accents and varieties; heritage languages; early and late second language acquisition. The volume will usefully supplement the vast literature on accent-perception with the novel perspective of examining its effects on pragmatic behavior. 

Tentative completion schedule:
Abstract submission deadline: 15 June 2024
Notification of abstract acceptance: 15 July 2024
Full manuscript deadline: 30 September 2024

References

Babel, M., & Russell, J. 2015. Expectations and speech intelligibility. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137(5), 2823–2833.

Baese-Berk, M. M., Bradlow, A. R., & Wright, B. A. 2013. Accent-independent adaptation to foreign accented speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 133(3), EL174–EL180.

Begus, K., Gliga, T., & Southgate, V. 2016. Infants learn what they want to learn: Responding to infant pointing leads to superior learning. PLoS ONE, 9(10), Article e108817. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0108817

Beltrama, A. & Schwarz, F. 2023. (Im)precise personae: The effect of socio-indexical information on semantic interpretation. Proceedings of Semantic and Linguistic Theory 31.

Floccia, C., Goslin, J., Girard, F., & Konopczynski, G. 2006. Does a regional accent perturb speech processing? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32(5), 1276.

Gluszek, A., & Dovidio, J. F. 2010. Speaking with a nonnative accent: Perceptions of bias, communication difficulties, and belonging in the United States. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(2), 224–234. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X09359590

Grey, S., & van Hell, J. G. 2017) Foreign-accented speaker identity affects neural correlates of language comprehension. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 42, 93–108.

Hanulíková, A., Van Alphen, P. M., Van Goch, M. M., & Weber, A. 2012. When one person's mistake is another's standard usage: The effect of foreign accent on syntactic processing. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 24(4), 878–887.

Ip, M. H. K. & Papafragou, A. 2023. The pragmatics of foreign accents: The social costs and benefits of being a non-native speaker. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. Advance online publication. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001197

Kinzler, K. D., Dupoux, E., & Spelke, E. S. 2007. The native language of social cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(30), 12577–12580. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0705345104

Kinzler, K. D., Shutts, K., Dejesus, J., & Spelke, E. S. 2009. Accent trumps race in guiding children’s social preferences. Social Cognition, 27(4), 623–634. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2009.27.4.623

Kutlu, E. 2023. Now you see me, now you mishear me: Raciolinguistic accounts of speech perception in different English varieties. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 44(6), 511–525.

Kutlu, E., Tiv, M., Wulff, S., & Titone, D. 2022a. The impact of race on speech perception and accentedness judgements in racially diverse and non-diverse groups. Applied Linguistics, 43(5), 867–890.

Kutlu, E., Tiv, M., Wulff, S., & Titone, D. 2022b. Does race impact speech perception? An account of accented speech in two different multilingual locales. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 7(1), 1–16.

Lev-Ari, S. & Keysar, B. 2010. Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093–1096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025

Lev-Ari, S. & Keysar, B. 2012. Less-detailed representation of non-native language: Why non-native speakers’ stories seem more vague. Discourse Processes, 49(7), 523–538. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2012.698493

McGowan, K. B. 2015. Social expectation improves speech perception in noise. Language and Speech, 58(4), 502–521.

Porretta, V., Tucker, B. V., & Järvikivi, J. 2016. The influence of gradient foreign accentedness and listener experience on word recognition. Journal of Phonetics, 58, 1–21.

Van Engen, K. J., & Peelle, J. E. 2014. Listening effort and accented speech. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 577.

Yi, H.‐G., Phelps, J. E. B., Smiljanic, R., & Chandrasekaran, B. 2013. Reduced efficiency for audiovisual integration for nonnative speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134, EL387–EL393.

Dr. Emilie Maurel-Destruel
Dr. Ethan Kutlu
Guest Editors

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• accents
• dialects
• pragmatics
• sociolinguistics
• inferences
• variation