Learners’ beliefs about teachers’ social characteristics influence their pronunciation preferences: A replication and extension of Hayes-Harb, Barrios & Tripp (2022)

Learners’ beliefs about language and language users impact the inferences they make about linguistic structure as well as their learning outcomes. In previous work, we found that participants preferred speech samples exhibiting a pronunciation pattern that was associated with a ‘teacher’ over that of a ‘student’ in a simulated language classroom context, indicating that language learners differentially weight their input based on characteristics of the speaker. We first replicated this study with a new pronunciation pattern (Experiment 1) and then extended the work by investigating whether preferences for the teacher’s pronunciation can be modulated by attributing ‘favorable’ vs. ‘unfavorable’ social characteristics to the teacher regarding their teaching experience, teaching effectiveness, and linguistic background (Experiment 2). We found that participants still tended to prefer the teacher’s pronunciation, but that the degree of preference was reduced when the teacher had been characterized unfavorably. We thus provide evidence that preferences for speech input from teachers are modulated by beliefs about the social characteristics of the teacher, presenting a challenge for asocial models of pronunciation learning and contributing to our understanding of linguistic stereotyping and its impact on language teaching and learning.