The impact of foreign accent on irony and its consequences on social interaction

Abstract

Literature has shown that foreign-accented (FA) speech modulates the degree of irony perceived by native (NA) individuals, but the subsequent consequences it may have on social interaction are unknown. To address this question, we presented Spanish first language (L1) users with written contexts with ironic/literal praises allocated to either a NA or a FA speaker. Written modality was used to avoid disfluency and to examine the impact of expectations of non-L1 comprehension on irony processing. For each of the 104 contexts, participants had to (1) assess the degree of irony of the speaker's praise inserted in the context, (2) assess the speaker's level of friendliness and (3) indicate the level of correctness of the response given to the ironic/ literal comment. Results indicate that the speaker's identity modulates the degree of perceived irony as well as the perceived appropriateness of the responses given to ironic comments, even when the accent is not experienced. The theory proposed to account for the findings is that the expectation one has of a foreign individual's speech affects language processing that leads to misinterpretations, which may, consequently, deteriorate social interaction between L1 and LX users.

War feels less horrid in a foreign accent: exploring the impact of the foreign accent on emotionality

“…Also, the results indicated that words (independently of their valence) elicited overall higher arousal when processed in a native accent than when processed in a foreign accent. Our results extend and confirm previous findings that suggested an impact of the foreign accent on emotionality (Hatzidaki et al, 2015;Bazzi et al, 2022a). This reduction of the emotional response when stimuli are produced in a foreign accent can be attributed to several factors, which are not mutually exclusive, mainly, linguistic fluency, language attitudes, and the linguistic context of language acquisition, as developed in the following sections.…”

“…The fact that a speaker does not belong to the same social/linguistic group generates psychological distance, which may alter how the information coming from this speaker is processed and may lead to a more abstract perception of the reality (Liberman and Trope, 2008). In this line, in Bazzi et al (2022a) study reported in the Introduction, the origin of the speaker affected the emotionality elicited when processing social norms. Indeed, recall that the foreign accent associated with a negative stereotype (Moroccan) provoked a less intense emotional response compared to the native accent and unfamiliar foreign accent (Indonesian).…”

“…To avoid potentials gender biases (due to acoustic differences, for example) the gender of the voices was balanced (two males, two females in each accent condition). Similarly, in the foreign condition, we used several distinct nationalities since recent findings have showed that social categorization or stereotypes related to the origin of foreign speakers may have a different impact on native speakers (Foucart and Brouwer, 2021;Bazzi et al, 2022a). Although the effect of gender and stereotypes on emotion processing is an interesting question, these factors were not analyzed here because the aim of this study was first to demonstrate whether accent affects emotion processing.…”

“…Recent empirical evidence suggests that the (foreign) accentedness of the speech may hamper the interpretation of the message. Literature has demonstrated that foreign-accented speech impacts the way native listeners process language at lexicosemantic, syntactic, or even pragmatic level (Goslin et al, 2012;Hanulíková et al, 2012;Romero-Rivas et al, 2015;Grey and van Hell, 2017;Caffarra et al, 2018;Foucart and Hartsuiker, 2021;Gosselin et al, 2021;Bazzi et al, 2022a;Puhacheuskaya and Järvikivi, 2022). The foreign accent also affects the way speakers are perceived by native speakers.…”