Dave Ogden will discuss "Positive Attitudes Through Better Understanding: The Role of Perceptual Adaptation in Accent-Based Discrimination."

Abstract
It has been argued that language, including accent, is one of the last domains in which discrimination is widely acceptable, and that language discrimination is a “back door” to discrimination on other traits like nationality, ethnicity, and gender (Lippi-Green, 2012). Researchers consistently find negative evaluations, and even linguistic profiling, of speakers and accents perceived as non-standard (see Lindemann & Subtirelu, 2013; Purnell, Idsardi, & Baugh, 1999). Accent discrimination resulting from negative attitudes linked to stereotypes of social groups is well-recognized in sociolinguistic research (Dragojevic & Giles, 2016; Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010). More recently, researchers have begun to assess how perceptual fluency, or the effortfulness that listeners feel in understanding accented speech, affects attitudes towards speakers. Disfluent perception, the experience associated with effortful information processing, leads to negative emotions and attitudes toward that information (Alter, 2013; Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009), and disfluent perception of an unfamiliar accent leads to negative evaluations of the speaker (Dragojevic & Giles, 2016). Yet listeners have a robust ability to adapt to and understand highly variable speech patterns, as shown by improvements in comprehension of non-native speech with listening experience (Baese-Berk, Bradlow, & Wright, 2013; Bradlow & Bent, 2008; Sidaras, Alexander, & Nygaard, 2009). I will present pilot data for an experiment testing the hypothesis that adaptation resulting in more fluent perception will lead to more positive attitudes towards a non-native speaker.