French or Québécois? How speaker accents shape implicit and explicit intergroup attitudes among francophones in Montréal.

The perception of accented speech creates a number of biases, but experimental evidence about their nature and the factors at play in these processes is scarce. The present study focused on francophone populations in Montreal, assessing implicit and explicit accent-based attitudes between Québécois (French Canadian) and European French groups. Twenty-seven Québécois and 31 French participants were administered a modified Implicit Association Test using Québécois- and French-accented speech samples and Stereotype Content questionnaires about the perceived warmth and competence of each group. For the implicit measure, French participants showed a significant in-group bias, whereas Québécois participants did not show any preference for either group. In contrast, explicit attitudes were mostly congruent: Québécois people were rated as slightly more warm than competent, whereas French people were rated much less warm than competent by all participants. No correlation was found between implicit and explicit measures. The asymmetry in implicit biases was explained by accent exposure, Québécois people being more familiar with the French accent than French people are with the Québécois accent. Explicit attitudes were partly explained by prestige differences between the two accents but could also have been influenced by moral beliefs held by the French participants as recent immigrants in Quebec. These results emphasize that implicit and explicit biases driven by speaker ...

Source: Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science - October 21, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research