Evidence that accent is a dimension of social categorization, not a byproduct of perceptual salience, familiarity, or ease-of-processing

Abstract

Certain features of language, such as accent, are acquired from the local social environment during an acquisition period starting at infancy and ending roughly at puberty. If the scale of social interaction expands after puberty, humans will encounter variance in these linguistic features, and the linguistic similarity between people will indicate the degree to which they share a common early social history. There is reason to believe that such a dynamic is not a modern phenomenon, but has likely occurred throughout our species’ evolutionary history since the advent of language. Consequently, the human mind may contain systems for categorizing others according to their linguistic repertoires, including their accents. Four studies demonstrate that (i) accent differences—both native versus non-native accents and also two different non-native accents‚ are the basis of spontaneous and implicit social categorization, and (ii) this is not driven by general acoustic-differences, low level sound differences, or differences in familiarity or ease-of-processing. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that human mind contains systems for categorizing others according to their accents.