Posted on 03/08/2010 9:46:11 AM PST by Raymann
Children, like adults, use three visible cues—race, gender and age—to arrange their social world. They prefer to make friends with kids similar to them on these traits. New research shows that verbal accents may be equally important in guiding youngsters’ social decisions—in fact, accents may be even more important than race.
...Going one step further, Kinzler and her team showed that an accent is more meaningful than race in signifying whether someone belongs in your social group. Replicating previous research, they found that under silent conditions children chose as potential friends children of the same race. Yet when the potential friends spoke, white children preferred a black child speaking with a native accent over a white child who spoke English with a foreign accent.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
Applies to regional accents, too.
Gee, who would’ve thunk! [/sarc]
Good, ‘cause I can do accents and I don’t much care for full-body paint.
Do these observations apply in Pockeestahn?
Y’all know he’s right. Right?
lol
What if it is an Ebonic acccent?
That’s not what I heard. ;-)
“What if it is an Ebonic acccent?”
I don’t know, what do you think?
If you were to here my voice, it would be pretty obvious that I’m from the rural South (Louisiana) and that I’m black.
So what, based on the sound of our voices you’d perfer someone with french-accented english other then me?
Makes sense. For many years, I worked in sales and customer service via telephone. I had to talk with clients all over the country. Accents really determine whether a client will relate to you.
It’s evident everywhere, without a study needed to tell us. You grow up in a certain community; you develop the accent and way of speaking there; and, in that way, you learn to relate to others within that community.
I know a Black who speaks better English than I do and he gets all sorts of crap from the Brothas about it. Why? I guess it is due to non-Ebonic accent.
Language is our biggest social connection .
We may like to believe that people can move up the social ladder but often even financially successful people are not accepted by their peers because of their regional or lower class vocabulary. I believe there are companies that teach proper diction and improve language skills for professionals that are being held back because of racial or social or regional accents.
One would think that TV would help to eliminate regional and class distinctions, but social group has a much larger impact.
This probably ties in with the importance of language as a social binder as illustrated by deafness.
It is generally agreed that sight is far more important than hearing as a way for us to obtain information about the world. Blindness is generally considered a greater handicap than deafness.
Yet the opposite is true in social relationships. AFAIKI, blind people haven’t formed an “in-group” with loyalties similar to those of an ethnic group. Deaf people have. To the extent that some of them refer to attempts to cure deafness as “genocide.”
I would assume this is due to the socializing power of language. Blind people can communicate effectively and bind with sighted people. Deaf people (many of them anyway) can only socialize with and bind to other deaf people.
Also,...Children who are born deaf have a very hard time learning to read. They have no concept of phonics and must learn every written word as if it were a hieroglyphic symbol. This significantly limits what they can know about the world around them.
You're right. TV has almost no effect; otherwise all of us would be speaking with the Midwestern accent favored by the producers of TV programs.
Indeed, your speech accent is formed by the people you grew up with.
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