Social Attitudes and Speech Ratings

Abstract

This study examined whether social bias manipulation can influence how naïve multiage listeners evaluate second language (L2) speech. Sixty native English-speaking listeners (Montreal residents) rated audio recordings of 40 Quebec French speakers of L2 English for five dimensions of oral performance (accentedness, comprehensibility, segmental accuracy, intonation, flow) using 1,000-point continuous scales. Immediately before rating, 20 listeners heard critical comments about Quebec French speakers’ English language skills, while 20 heard positive comments. Twenty listeners (baseline group) received no manipulation. Compared to baseline listeners, positively oriented listeners (younger and older) rated four of five dimensions more favorably. However, listeners’ behavior diverged under negative bias. Compared to age-matched baseline listeners, younger listeners upgraded speakers while older listeners downgraded speakers for all targeted measures. Findings cast doubt on the relative stability of L2 speech ratings and point to the importance of social context and generational differences in untrained rater assessments of L2 speaking performance.

Searching for the “native” speaker: A preregistered conceptual replication and extension of Reid, Trofimovich, and O’Brien (2019)

“…With respect to our first research question, we failed to replicate Reid et al (2019). We found no effect of social bias in our study and no effect of age.…”

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This study conceptually replicated and extended Reid, Trofimovich, and O'Brien (2019), who found that native English speakers could be biased positively (or negatively) relative to a control condition in terms of how they rate non-native English speech. Our internetbased study failed to replicate Reid et al across a wider population sample of "native" speakers (n = 189).

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“…Clearly, the speaker/listener's setting matters when discussing native/non-natives. Reid et al (2019) added participants' age as a construct because of a historical event (i.e., enactment of a French language policy in Québec). In this regard, our more global participant pool lacks a unified language-related event to have stoked a bias against (or for) a certain set of othered English NNS.…”

“…To summarize, our conceptual replication of Reid et al (2019) investigates whether social biases, manipulated by exposing native English speakers to negative or positive comments about NNS language abilities, impact their ratings of nonnative speech across five linguistic dimensions. The study's two research questions are:…”

Metacognition in Second Language Speech Perception and Production

“…In light of our results suggesting that self‐assessment (reliance on self‐confidence) can successfully guide L2 learning, training individuals to become more accurate at assessing their own perception and production can lead to better learning outcomes and facilitate L2 learning. This is important as listeners’ assessment of L2 speakers’ production can be unstable and vary as a function of the listeners’ age and native language (Saito et al., 2019) and can be prone to social bias (Reid et al., 2019) and task effects (Crowther et al., 2018). The hypothesis that training metacognition can increase the efficiency of L2 learning is further supported by research on the use of metacognition in classroom teaching, in a broader sense, showing that metacognitive instruction can enhance the effectiveness of corrective feedback (Sato & Loewen, 2018).…”