Accent Bias in Britain: what about foreign accents?

Bias: you can try to be colour-blind; can you be 'accent-deaf'?

'um yeah, interesting... '

'sorry could you say that again?'

'can I just ask... where are you from?'

You know those moments; when you realize that people are making judgments about you or summing you up based on how you sound rather than what you say.

In these moments, there's probably some accent bias happening... maybe even some accent discrimination.

I've been looking today at fantastic research project called Accent Bias Britain.

It's led by Queen Mary, University of London and it looks at how much accent bias there is in British society today.

There's a 'training for employers' section that I caught my eye: it includes a quiz on accent bias - to see whether you can filter out accent bias and judge people just on what they're saying not on how they sound.

I wanted to see if I would pass the test!

This quiz works like this: you play a series of audio clips, of young male voices, giving answers to interview questions on a range of subjects relating to the legal profession ( the research was originally carried out with lawyers and legal recruiters, a notoriously un-diverse profession).

The task is to focus on how good their responses are, and to try not to pay attention to their accent.

You rate the answer as good - thumbs up - or poor - thumbs down.

Here's one of the samples:

This is an example of what they call General Northern English: a sort of Northern English version of RP, like a standardized sound that's not linked to any particular town or city in the north of England.

I thought this was a bit of a flimsy answer, so I gave it the thumbs down.

moving on...

here we've got an RP, or Received Pronunciation accent. This is the accent that I work with as a baseline sound for the coaching that I do with people. (It’s also pretty close to my own accent).

Regardless of the accent, I think this is a convincing answer. The substance of what this person was saying is good so I gave it a thumbs-up.

Next...

This is what they call Urban West Yorkshire English and it's a relatively new accent, that you hear especially in the Leeds-Bradford conurbation.

I think if I was a lawyer, I'd think that was a good answer so I rated that positively.

Here we've got Multicultural London English: again quite a new accent, it's a sort of evolution of Cockney London English, with all the influences of the Afro-Caribbean, African, Bangladeshi and countless other different cultures and sounds that you get in London, fused together in this accent.

I rated that one as good - thumbs up.

I progressed through the questions til I came to another variety of spoken English:

This is Estuary English: this is this a sort of generalised, Cockney-influenced suburban London accent - actually it goes beyond the London suburbs. You hear this all over the southeast of England, not just in the Thames Estuary Putting aside the accent - I thought this was a poor answer. I gave it the thumbs-down.

So how did I do?

I got a seven out of ten!

The results page says, ‘almost there but you're still a bit distracted by accent’.

So that’s interesting…

Not to sound defensive… but I wondered a little bit whether this was to do with my accent bias or with me not being a lawyer or legal recruiter. Unilke the test subjects in the Accent Bias Britain research, who were originally asked to assess these responses, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for in terms of the substance of the answer.

Motivation to Control a Prejudiced Response (MCPR)

With some of the accents, that the survey has found people to show bias against, like the urban West Yorkshire accent, the Estuary accent, or the Multicultural London English accent - sometimes with those I was doing something which I discovered from looking at other bits of the website is known as ‘motivation to control a

prejudiced response’.

It says this is ‘a psychological factor that has a strong effect on how listeners behaved in our nationwide survey’.

Listeners who were concerned that they should not seem prejudiced gave higher overall ratings for personal likeability ( in another part of the survey, they asked people to rate likeability: ‘do you like the sound of that accent more than this one’)

I think I was probably feeling some MCPR in my quiz responses: I was more forgiving to the ‘lower-status’ sounds like MLE because I didn’t want to complete the quiz and be told I was biased against the urban youth of England!

My accent bias coming out

I think where there was accent bias acting on me was in the question about a legal decision that you disagreed with (question 7 in the quiz) and why:

Aas it turned out, this would have been considered from a legal standpoint to be a poor answer. I thought it was a good answer. I think my favourable view of the answer had a lot to do with the accent.

So there's a bit of it going on for me, as there is bias, of all kinds, going on for everybody.

Accent Bias: the good news

As this research project points out, the good news is that accent bias can be managed when employers are aware of the potential for accent bias. They found that lawyers and legal recruiters are capable of filtering for it and were able to focus on the substance of the answers, and not allow accent bias to have an influence on their on their ratings.

so that's reassuring!

What about ‘foreign’ accent bias?

The fact is, all of the accents being judged or considered here are accents of England - but what about foreign accents?

What about if this quiz was run with accents of non-native speakers of English?

How did you find that? how easy was it to follow?

Because this is another factor in accent bias, and this is not to do with the social or cultural status of accents alone.

The difficulty that people have understanding something affects the credibility of that something - there's been some great research done by an academic called Shiri Lev Ari about why people might discriminate against foreign accents and it explains this issue of processing fluency - how the cognitive work required to understand something can have an effect on how credible it sounds

The article is very interesting: and here’s the study that was recently done.

What Lev Ari found in her earlier work, was that people are more likely to believe things that are easier to process, but this new piece of research shows that ‘a short exposure to foreign accents can reduce this bias' and the reduction in biases is due to Improvement in the processing of an accent’ - so the more exposure that listeners get to certain accents the easier they're going to find them to process.

so that's more good news!

it kind of means that the more Polish accents. French accents, Italian accents, Russian accents, Spanish accents, and all the other non-native accentsthat people get to hear, the easier they’ll find them to understand.

Simple, right?

This is good news for us for people that I work with - it means that we don't have to have a perfect British accent in order to be understood in a British workplace.

For those of you reading this in North America: it means you don't need to have a perfect American or a perfect Canadian accent in order to make yourself understood and have credibility

People around us will adapt.

But I think it's helpful in the short term while we wait for that process to come to fruition, if we as individuals can meet those listeners halfway so that we can reduce the amount of work that the listener's brain is having to do to keep up with us and to absorb everything that we're saying.

That's why accent reduction can help get you where you want to go.

it's about focusing on those few sounds in your accent that are most unfamiliar to a typical listener.

We can just allow them to focus on what's been being said and not get distracted by how it's being

said.

We can't count on everybody that we come across or speak to to be as good at filtering for bias and focusing on substance as these legal recruiters were in this piece of research. We have to meet people where they are.

Take the quiz!

I want to hear if you've gone on the Accent Bias Britain website and taken the quiz - have a go and see what your results are and drop me a line.

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