ABSTRACT
People communicate substantial information about themselves with their accents. Through a social psychological lens, this chapter reviews first that people pay attention and react to different accents due to their evolutionary (signal of potential threat), social (signal of group membership), and cognitive (signal that is difficult to process) relevance. Second, this chapter discusses various effects related to the difficulty of comprehension of accented speech, the activation of social categories by vocal and other concomitant cues, and the stereotypes and expectations that permeate social categories, as accents can prompt distinctions between groups of people and can be a stronger cue to group membership than appearance. Finally, the chapter discusses negative consequences connected with accented speech related to the formation of ingroup favoritism and negative evaluations of those with a nonnative accent, such as prejudice and discriminatory behaviors, self-stereotyping, and stigma for the speakers. Potential future directions for accentism research integrating sociophonetic and socio-psychological approaches are therefore addressed.
