介绍： This is Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Lucy Huang.
About 1.5 billion people speak English around the world. But for more than 1.1 billion of them, English is their second language — often with a noticeable accent.
"Your accent really reveals a lot about who you are and your identity. It will t...

介绍： This is Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Lucy Huang.
About 1.5 billion people speak English around the world. But for more than 1.1 billion of them, English is their second language — often with a noticeable accent.
"Your accent really reveals a lot about who you are and your identity. It will tell people what your native language is, be able to tell you probably where you come from." Marc Pell, a communications professor at McGill University in Montreal. And according to Pell, one reaction to a different accent can be a bias against that person.
"Previous research that has been done elsewhere showed that people who have an accent tend to be trusted less, simply because they have an accent. But the idea that we would have a bias against anyone who sort of doesn't sound like us I think probably relates to some sort of evolutionary or long-standing suspicion we have of outsiders or strangers. So this might be sort of an ingrained response that we have to the accent."

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学。我是露西·黄。
全球有约15亿人说英语。但其中有超过11亿人的母语并不是英语，因此他们说英语时往往带有明显的口音。
“你的口音的确会透露有关你本身和身份的大量信息。口音能告诉他人你的母语是什么，可能也会让别人知道你来自哪里。”位于蒙特利尔的麦吉尔大学的传播学教授马克·佩尔说到。佩尔表示，对不同口音产生反应可能是对这个人的偏见。
“其他地区做的早前研究表明，有口音的人往往可信度会降低，仅仅是因为他们说英语有口音。但我们会对口音和我们不同的人产生偏见，可能与某种进化有关，或可能与我们长期以来对外来者或陌生人抱有的怀疑态度有关。因此，这可能是我们对口音的某种根深蒂固的反应。”