Why an accent makes a statement harder to believe

Listeners rate identical trivia statements as less likely to be true when read by a speaker with a non-native accent. When told in advance that the speaker is reading a script written by someone else, the effect shrinks but does not vanish. The content is word-for-word the same; only the acoustic difficulty has changed.

What everyone sees

The reduction in credibility is easily read as prejudice, and prejudice is present in many settings. But the effect appears even among listeners who report no negative attitudes, and it scales with how hard the accent is to process rather than with how the accent group is regarded. Something mechanical is operating underneath whatever attitudes are present.

What is actually happening

Lev-Ari and Keysar found that accented speech reduced perceived truthfulness of trivia statements and attributed the effect to processing difficulty rather than to stereotyping, since informing listeners of the source reduced but did not eliminate it. Schwarz’s work on processing fluency shows that ease of processing is used as a cue for truth: statements that are easier to read, hear or recall are judged more likely to be true. An unfamiliar accent lowers fluency, and lowered fluency is read as lowered credibility because the listener cannot tell which source their difficulty came from.

Why it stays hidden

The misattribution hides because the listener has one undifferentiated feeling of difficulty and no access to its cause. Effort spent decoding a vowel and effort spent evaluating a dubious claim produce the same sensation, and the mind assigns that sensation to whatever is currently in focus — the claim. Being told the speaker did not write the script corrects the inference partially, which is precisely what a mechanical rather than attitudinal effect predicts.