Accentedness and personality evaluation of Asian and Caucasian second language speakers of English by Asian second language English listeners

ABSTRACT

Previous research that explores the effect of ethnicity in the perception of speaker accentedness and personality traits often finds that Asian appearance contributes to a more accented and less competent impression. Importantly, most of the work done to date employed only Caucasian first language-speaking listeners; moreover, ethnicity and gender were not considered together. This study describes a series of evaluations of nine Korean (Asian) and nine German (Caucasian) second language English speakers by 41 Chinese listeners. The participants were asked to rate each speaker on an accentedness and 12 personality scales under two conditions: audio-only and audiovisual. The accentedness result indicates that with the availability of visual information, Korean speakers were rated significantly more accented than German speakers and male speakers were rated less accented than females. As for personality evaluation, the result suggests that power and competence traits share a similar trend, with Korean and female speakers being rated lower when listeners can see them, but solidarity traits show a slightly different trend. In general, Chinese listeners’ bias in relation to speaker ethnicity and gender in both accentedness and personality evaluation was highlighted by the use of visual information, and a relationship between linguistic and social information was demonstrated.

KEYWORDS:

• Accentedness perception
• personality evaluation
• second language perception
• sociolinguistics
• second language
• language attitudes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to participants for their time, as well as the audiences of the 2020 ALS conference and the 2021 Sociolinguistics Symposium, an anonymous reviewer, and the editorial team for feedback on earlier versions of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).