Pragmatic and knowledge lenience towards foreigners

Sentences uttered by foreign-accented speakers are often judged differently compared to those produced by native speakers. For instance, true statements that are not widely known (Ants don’t sleep) tend to be judged as less credible when produced by foreign-accented speakers. This phenomenon has been explained based on different intelligibility whereby foreign accent involves more processing load in the listeners, influencing the judgment of the statement. Critically, foreign-accented speech may also lead to an implicit categorization of the speaker as an outgroup individual (foreign) in terms of cultural and social heritage. Our main aim here was to explore whether the identification of an individual as a native or foreign speaker has an impact per se on unknown statement judgments. To avoid any influence of the auditory signal, we used a written modality presentation of the statements. In the two studies we present here, we first aim to replicate the Fairchild and Papafragou study on scalar implicature (Study 1); then we used the similar procedure to test unknown state- ments (Study 2). In study 1, 244 native Italian speakers participated. The experimental set was composed of 20 under-informative sentences. Furthermore, three filler conditions were added. Participants first saw short-bio description of two speakers. Each short-bio either gave a description of a native Italian speaker with a strong Roman accent (Native speaker condition) or a native speaker of Moldovan with a strong Moldovan accent (For- eign speaker condition). The participants were then instructed that they would be reading 40 sentences that were originally uttered by the speaker they had just read. Participants had to rate how each sentence made sense on a five-point Likert scale. Analyses were performed on the rating responses of the critical sentence con- dition. Results showed a main effect of the Speaker due to the fact that ratings for Under-Informative sentences were higher in the Foreign speaker condition (M=2.55, SD=1.48) than in the Native speaker condition (M=2.49, SD=1.47). In study 2, 239 native Italian speakers participated. The experimental set was composed of 20 un- known sentences (‘The capital of Botswana is Gaborone’). Furthermore, true and false filler conditions were added. The same task, presentation modality, and analyses as for Study 1 were used. Results revealed a main effect of the Speaker with ratings for Unknown sentences were higher in the Foreign Speaker (M=2.99, SD=0.86) condition than in the Native Speaker (M=2.95, SD=0.88) condition. Together, our results showed that the cat- egorization of speakers as foreign or native per se modulates the acceptability of statements independently from differences of processing linked to fluency. The results showed more acceptable judgments when under- informative (Study 1) and unknown (Study 2) sentences were associated with the foreign speaker as compared to native speakers. Together, our results suggest that native speakers do not only tend to forgive lack of linguis- tic competence of foreign speakers, by accepting as more sensible under-informative statements, but they also tend to trust more foreign speakers in situations of lack of knowledge.