Dec 8 ===== Gluszek/Dovidio:2010 -------------------- Can an accent also have a „positive stigma“, depending on positive stereotypes about a country? The paper states there are different opinions on whether a foreign accent can be eliminated by practice, and that a listener's opinion on that influences how comfortable they are with hearing an accent. Can learning foreign languages and living abroad make people more tolerant towards accents? The comparison of non-native like L2 acquisition to "ducks [which] fail to become swans" - having an accent is a unique part of one's identity, and how close it is to native speech does not need to be/must not be the measure of acquisition. To not (at least without proper deliberation with the task in mind) use native speakers as a standard for evaluation of accented speech. I think the paper does a good job of pointing out several factors on side of the (accented) speaker, eg. how confident they are, how they think they are perceived etc. Including non-native listeners adds a lot more variability to this factor of self-perception in conversation context (I would assume), and allows to compare perception between native and non-native listeners (e.g., taking into account differences in sociocultural context/biases etc.) I was once told by a lecturer (English department, sadly no sources) that studies exist that state that the only influencing factors of whether a particular person can learn to fluently speak another language "accent free" is how good of a mimic/actor they are. This study supposedly ruled out willingness to learn, need to learn, how apt at learning languages people were and similar favtors. Will the uniqueness of nonnative accents slowly weaken in the future? What kind of influence does the region where the listener lives have on their prejudice? I think it is plausible that people from big cities, where it is more common that people with nonnative accents are in daily contact with native speakers, have – as a group - made substantially different experiences than people in rural areas, where even native speakers with a different accent are a rarity. Does the existence of stigma towards people with nonnative accents not just show that a lot more communication and interaction would be worth striving for on a societal level? In the view of native speakers, extended communication with nonnative speakers would make encounters with them more common and would make it less likely to perceive people as foreign. For nonnative speakers, this could highly benefit their confidence regarding their L2 language skills because they would get more chances to interact, possibly in a way that is not impacted by prejudice. What research has been done since this paper was published that uses these expansions of Cargile's model? What relations between the speaker's perception have we been able to make that connects with this body of research we already have about listeners' perception? The paper points out that people who speak in a nonnative accent face several problems during communication if their interlocuter is prejudiced against nonnative speakers. How do those prejudices come into existence even though there are so many examples of competent people who do not speak in a native accent? I think, it would be interesting to analyze more concrete examples of accent perception across diverse countries, e.g. how the French accent is treated in the USA, Germany, Russia, etc. and how French people treat Russian, English, German, etc. accent. The results can be discussed in terms of the factors on p. 220 (pdf-file: p.7). Could we evaluate the effect of accent with an exemplar-based model? Can we research accents on a speech production level ? e.g does an accented speaker produce vowels/consonants differently, or is it about the prosody, or the stress, etc When looking at accents prejudices from native speakers could also be influenced from experiences with non-native speakers, whose accent was barely there or not recognizable. Would that influence the native speaker into more judgmental space, because they experienced non-native speakers from one particular origin, that had no visible accent, in terms of "They just need to put more effort into sounding more native“ or more prejudice in the perceived notion, that people with hearable accents are "uneducated" even though as the paper stated they are multi competent speakers. Regarding accents and dialects, how can one compare the results in this paper, which looked mostly at english, with languages that carry many dialects, and can there even be a lot of these negative notions within one language when looking at people that are perceived as dialect speakers first? Objective comprehensibility: to what extent can it be objective? In light of Rubin's study (mentioned on p.219), objective comprehensibility seems to be overtaken by subjective comprehensibility, so when listeners are biased, they might reject to understand comprehendible for unbiased listeners' speech. Given that, it seems to be plausible to measure accent strength with respect to standard pronunciation based on the discrepancies between the 2 types of listeners' subjective comprehensibility scores. However, would it still be a truly objective comprehensibility? Even if a listener is unbiased but has never experienced a certain accent before, a more experienced unbiased listener will comprehend a much larger portion of a nonnative accented speech. "Since then, four decades of research have shown that those who speak nonnatively accented language in general are perceived more negatively than are speakers with native accents" (p. 217) I would be interested to know how exactly prejudice and stigmatization differ among speakers who are accustomed to communicate in nonnative languages (towards each other as well as nonnative speakers of their native language). "Similar results of accent hierarchy have been found in other countries." (p. 218) Are there any striking differences or similarities in these hierarchies between different countries? "Past research has identified six major dimensions of stigma: concealability, origin or controllability, progress, aesthetics, peril, and disruptiveness (Crocker et al., 1998; Jones et al., 1984)." (p.219) Is it possible to get a precise definition of these dimensions? How exactly are they measured? Raising awareness to the many stereotypes and prejudices associated with nonnative accents is important and this article does a great job of it. I jsut want to remark that there are accents that are unintelligible for some listeners (re: page 5 / 218). Also, I don't 100% agree with p. 16 / 229: I agree that having an accent is not a negative trade of the speaker. However, we should acknowledge that everyone using similar accents makes communication much easier, especially in interactive settings with several participants. zu Gluszek&Dovidio (2010), page 9 / 222: I'm not surprised that actors are good at doing accents. They actively train their speech. I wouldn't be surprised either if phoneticians were pretty good with accents, as well. zu Gluszek&Dovidio (2010), page 10 / 223: "The second element is how much speakers of the same language differ in the degree to which they deviate from standard pronunciation of the listener's native language." - This seems a strange definition for accent strength. If, hypothetically, all French spoke English with a very noticible accent because they learned English only from reading books, their accent strength would be considered relatively weak because all of them share this trade? Or is this a definition of range ("best speaker vs worst speaker") and not of statistics (standard deviation)? Accents associated with AAVE may cause different responses in the listener, could this also be similar for languages that are very close to each other like Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish - where they're virtually intelligible to the other language speakers with minor grammar/word variation and accent being the biggest ways to tell the language apart? They also typically hold negative sentiment towards each other like how AAVE is in the US, and are perceived as a separate dialect/language so they have quite a few parallels to the paper. Not sure I fully understood how "native" was defined. The researchers said that native speakers with stigmatized accents were less likely to face stigma directly related to perceived difficulty of communication - but is this prejudice retained when native speakers are not familiar with other dialects of the same language? Interesting point of discussion for me is the extent to which certain nonnative accents are perceived positively. For context - at one point the researchers mentioned that even when speakers couldn't identify where a nonnative accent came from they still held prejudices. However, they did mention that nonnative speakers with, for example, a Western European accent may be viewed as prestigious.