According to new research co-authored by a UTM professor, children as young as five years old may exhibit signs of accent-based biases. Data revealed that children preferred teachers with a local accent over regional or non-native accents in a journal article co-authored by UTM psychology professor Elizabeth Johnson, Melissa Paquette-Smith from the University of California Los Angeles, and Helen Buckler from the University of Nottingham.
“It was something that surprised me,” Johnson says.
The research was published earlier this year in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology under the title “How sociolinguistic factors shape children’s subjective impressions of teacher quality.”
Before working on the research, Johnson thought about how accent biases relate to everyday life. Specifically, its effects on student evaluations of faculty. The study discusses its findings in relation to implicit bias in higher education. Those biases could hamper movements to promote diversity in higher education, Johnson says.
We don’t frequently pay attention to these sort of language issues when we look at how students evaluate their professors. And it’s a big deal because we have tons of professors whose first language isn’t English. We wanted to know, where does that come from?
Johnson
“The biases become stronger with age,” she adds. “We read [professor] evaluations and they might be obviously gendered in some way, or they might obviously be speaking like a non-native accent.”
Johnson says she believes it’s important to consider the role accent perception plays in those evaluations.
“We don’t frequently pay attention to these sort of language issues when we look at how students evaluate their professors,” she says. “And it’s a big deal because we have tons of professors whose first language isn’t English. “We wanted to know, where does that come from?”
Johnson collaborated with Paquette-Smith and Buckler, with whom she had previously worked at UTM. Paquette-Smith earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees at UTM, and Buckler worked as a postdoctoral researcher there for three years.
They began researching the topic after seeing similar research from the United States and France that showed children had accent biases. However, given the higher level of exposure children have to various English accents in Canada, they expected the results to be different.
Trials with children aged five and six were conducted, in which they were presented with pairs of speakers of the same gender. The study included 144 monolingual Canadian English-speaking children aged five to six from southern Ontario. They came from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds and had varying degrees of exposure to various English accents.
Speech samples from paired speakers were shown to the children. One speaker had a Canadian accent, while the other had either a different regional accent—British or Australian—or a non-native accent—Dutch and French.
The children were asked two questions after: who they wanted to be their teacher and how good of a teacher they thought each speaker would be.
The results showed that the children demonstrated a preference for Canadian-accented teachers and rated them more favorably. Children rated French, Australian, and Dutch speakers as less competent than Canadian speakers, with British speakers rated slightly below Canadian speakers. The authors suggest that the children are evaluating non-local speakers more negatively.
“We tried to prove to Canadian kids that they were more accepting than American kids, and it didn’t work,” Johnson says.
According to their findings, even children who had parents with different accents preferred local accents. Johnson wants to investigate whether the cause is social or linguistic. Follow-up research revealed that comprehension does not explain everything.
“There’s definitely some social bias going on,” Johnson says. “You really do need to be concerned about this much younger than you thought.”
Finding out what causes accent bias and when it appears is “important for society and the way we function, the way we make decisions about people’s competency, and the way we choose to portray people in the media,” she says.
The team is now attempting to understand what drives the development of linguistic bias in children, as well as what the results would be in different populations receiving different “linguistic inputs.”
“We’re also curious about what kinds of experiences might mitigate the formation or maintenance of negative linguistic biases in young children.”
