The impact of social bias on adults' learning of the pronunciation of a new language - Native speakerhood, 2AFC, orange/blue talkers

This study investigates the effect of listeners’ perceptions of accents and how those perceptions impact language acquisition. Specifically, we are interested in how a pervasive racialized standard of a “native speaker” can impede language learning because of social bias. We will conduct an accent preference experiment, studying explicit bias. We hypothesize that participants’ preference for the speech of a talker will be modulated by beliefs about their "native speakerhood". Our objective is to replicate our recent finding that participants’ degree of preference for a speaker's pronunciation over that of another speaker is reduced when they are told that the speaker is a “nonnative” as opposed to a “native” speaker of the language.