Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of Delaware, USA.
Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Cognition. 2020 Jul;200:104171. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104171. Epub 2020 Mar 31.
Foreign-accented non-native speakers sometimes face negative biases compared to native speakers. Here we report an advantage in how comprehenders process the speech of non-native compared to native speakers. In a series of four experiments, we find that under-informative sentences are interpreted differently when attributed to non-native compared to native speakers. Specifically, under-informativeness is more likely to be attributed to inability (rather than unwillingness) to say more in non-native as compared to native speakers. This asymmetry has implications for learning: under-informative teachers are more likely to be given a second chance in case they are non-native speakers of the language (presumably because their prior under-informativeness is less likely to be intentional). Our results suggest strong effects of non-native speech on social-pragmatic inferences. Because these effects emerge for written stimuli, they support theories that stress the role of expectations on non-native comprehension, even in the absence of experience with foreign accents. Finally, our data bear on pragmatic theories of how speaker identity affects language comprehension and show how such theories offer an integrated framework for explaining how non-native language can lead to (sometimes unexpected) social meanings.
带有外国口音的非母语说话者有时会面临比母语说话者更负面的偏见。在这里，我们报告了一种优势，即在理解者处理非母语说话者和母语说话者的语音时存在优势。在一系列四项实验中，我们发现，归因于非母语说话者和母语说话者的信息不足的句子的解释不同。具体来说，与母语说话者相比，非母语说话者的信息不足更有可能归因于无法（而不是不愿意）说出更多的话。这种不对称对学习有影响：在非母语说话者的情况下，信息不足的老师更有可能获得第二次机会（大概是因为他们之前的信息不足不太可能是故意的）。我们的结果表明，非母语语音对社会语用推理有强烈影响。由于这些影响出现在书面刺激物上，因此它们支持了强调期望对非母语理解作用的理论，即使在没有外国口音经验的情况下也是如此。最后，我们的数据涉及到说话者身份如何影响语言理解的语用理论，并展示了这些理论如何为解释非母语如何导致（有时是意想不到的）社会意义提供了一个综合框架。
