Why don’t we believe non-native speakers and how can exposure to foreign accents reduce this bias?
2:00pm - 3:00pm /
Wednesday 4th May 2022
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Speaker: Dr Shiri-Lev Ari, Royal Holloway University of London
When something is harder to process, people judge it more negatively, and even believe it less. In this talk, I will show that this tendency leads people to believe information less when it is said with a foreign accent, simply because it is harder to process. I will further show how this implicit negative bias can be reduced with exposure to foreign accent. Lastly, I will show how interacting with a more diverse group of people has wider benefits and can improve individuals’ communication skills in general.
Dr. Lev-Ari is a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Chicago and was previously a post-doc at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in Paris, and a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Dr. Lev-Ari is interested in how the social environment influences language processing, and how the way we process language, in turn, influences the social environment. She investigates this topic using a combination of individual differences studies, experimental paradigms, and computational simulations.
Please register for this event via Eventbrite.
When something is harder to process, people judge it more negatively, and even believe it less. In this talk, I will show that this tendency leads people to believe information less when it is said with a foreign accent, simply because it is harder to process. I will further show how this implicit negative bias can be reduced with exposure to foreign accent. Lastly, I will show how interacting with a more diverse group of people has wider benefits and can improve individuals’ communication skills in general.
Dr. Lev-Ari is a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Chicago and was previously a post-doc at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in Paris, and a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Dr. Lev-Ari is interested in how the social environment influences language processing, and how the way we process language, in turn, influences the social environment. She investigates this topic using a combination of individual differences studies, experimental paradigms, and computational simulations.
Please register for this event via Eventbrite.