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The impact of foreign accent on social interaction and cognitive processes.

Objective

‘Ants don’t sleep’. One would think that this sentence should be assessed as equally true (or false) independently of the speaker’s accent. It is not the case. Overall, speakers with a foreign accent (FA) are judged as less trustworthy, less educated, less intelligent and less competent than native speakers. This negative bias towards foreign-accented speakers (thereafter, FA bias) has critical consequences on many aspects of everyday life (e.g. job discrimination). Given the migration flow in Europe, it is crucial to understand the impact FA bias has on social interaction. This negative bias seems to have different origins: linguistic (FA is more difficult to understand than native accent, thus, it reduces ‘processing fluency’), and social (FA triggers a rapid categorisation of the speaker as out-group). The project will investigate 1) how FA bias affects cognitive processes, and 2) the modulation of the FA bias by social stereotypes and its consequences in the brain. The project is innovative as it examines the real-time impact of FA on cognitive processes using event-related potentials, a technique that allows recording online brain activity. The proposed experiments involve native listeners and non-native speakers with a medium FA. The findings will be of interest for many fields like linguistics, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and to some extent for other social disciplines (law, education, health). They will also be relevant for social institutions (Council of Europe) and services for immigrants (Linguistic Integration of Adult Migrants). The outcome of the project will be useful to generate solutions to reduce this social bias. Moreover, the project fits well with the current interest of the ERA, being in line with FP7 funded projects like ‘European Multilingual Experience’. Finally, Prof. Hartsuiker’s laboratory (Ghent University, Belgium) in which speech processing and bilingualism are investigated provides a perfect scientific environment.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Funding Scheme

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MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EF

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2015

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 160 800,00
Address
SINT PIETERSNIEUWSTRAAT 25
9000 GENT
Belgium

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Region
Vlaams Gewest Prov. Oost-Vlaanderen Arr. Gent
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 160 800,00
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