Vodcast #38 – The Perception of Accents by Goodie Okechukwu

• April 13, 2021
• Margot
• no comments

“Ants don’t sleep.” 🔎 A psycholinguist Shiri Lev-Ari had both native and non-native speakers record this simple statement and then played the recordings back to native speakers only, who in turn had to rate them from the most to the least true. The heavily accented statements were deemed the least true, despite having the exact same content as the natively spoken sentences. 🚧 Today, as we are more exposed than ever to different accents, both in the workplace and in our personal lives, #accent discrimination plays a bigger hinderance in effective communication than ever before. Research has shown that having a strong accent can affect how employable you are and can bias how people view your intelligence, friendliness, and trustworthiness. In France, politicians have been pushing to make glottophobia, a recently coined term for discrimination based on pronunciation and tone, a criminal offense. In this week’s video, @Goodie Okechukwu, Founder of Protect Accents walks us through the psychology behind accent discrimination. The good news – it doesn’t have to be fixed behavior and people can evolve as they shift their mindset. Thoughts? #Accent #Discrimination #growthmindset #CrossCulturalRelationships #Globalization