891. If you're like me, the first segment about accent hallucination will blow your mind. And then after we recover, we'll learn how to avoid false ranges.
891. Your mind will be blown when you learn about accent hallucination. (Mine was!) And then we'll learn how to avoid false ranges.
Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/accent-hallucination-false-ranges
References for the Accent Hallucination segment by Valerie Fridland:
Babel, M., & Russell, J. (2015). Expectations and speech intelligibility. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137(5), 2823–2833.
Bradlow, A. R., and Bent, T. (2008). Perceptual adaptation to non-native
Speech. Cognition 106(2), 707–729.
Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don't we believe non-native speakers? the influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093-1096:
Rubin, D.L. 1992. Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates' judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Res High Educ 33, 511–531
Vaughn C. R. (2019). Expectations about the source of a speaker's accent affect accent adaptation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145(5), 3218.
References for the False Range segment by Rhiannon Root:
Walsh, B. "Everything's Ranging." The Slot. https://www.theslot.com/range.html (accessed September 1, 2022).
Grammar Monkeys (McLendon, L.). "Home, home on the range." Madam Grammar. May 20, 2010. https://madamgrammar.com/tag/false-range/ (accessed September 1, 2022).
McIntyre, J. "Getting the range." You Don't Say. February 10, 2010. http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2010/02/getting-range.html (accessed September 1, 2022).
"Commas." The Chicago Manual of Style (Q&A), 17th edition. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Commas/faq0062.html (accessed September 1, 2022).
Corbett, P.B. "Everything from this to that." After Deadline: New York Times Blog. August 24, 2010. https://archive.nytimes.com/afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/everything-from-this-to-that/ (accessed September 1, 2022).
"Appendix." SeaWorld. https://seaworld.org/animals/all-about/penguins/appendix/ (accessed September 1, 2022).
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.
Today, we're going to talk about some linguistic studies about accents that absolutely blew my mind, and then we're going to talk about a common tool called a false range that can set some people's teeth on edge (and yet other people don't even notice).
The surprising ways accent bias, even without any accent, hinders communication
by Valerie Fridland
Research has shown over and over that people tend to prefer people who sound like them, leading to what is called accent bias, or negative feelings about people who speak with a different accent.
Researchers have found that accent bias leads to problems for non-native speakers by making it harder for them to have the same chances to succeed in school or in work as native speakers. And people often don't have much legal recourse when they are discriminated against because of the way they sound. For example, employers may argue that the accent would interfere with work performance.
But research has shown that even the belief that speakers have an accent, rather than any accent itself, creates a barrier to comprehension. This means that some speakers, especially those who might be mistaken as non-native, might suffer from accent bias without even having an accent. And it may be that the increased cognitive processing required when encountering an unfamiliar accent, or just expecting to hear one, is partially to blame for problems with communication. In other words, people have to use a little more brain power when they first hear someone with an accent, or even when they see someone and expect to hear an accent.
Seeing is believing
The phenomenon of thinking someone looks like they will have an accent can lead to what researchers call accent hallucination. Accent hallucination! This is a situation where a native speaker is heard as having a foreign accent when they actually don't.
Here's an example: In a well-known study done in the United States in the 1990s, researcher Donald Rubin had college students listen to an audio lecture given by a TA, a university role often filled by foreign PhD students. Although all the students heard an identical lecture by the same native English speaker, one group was shown a photo of an Asian woman and another group was shown a photo of a white woman.
Just seeing a non-white teaching assistant made students rate the voice as more accented compared to the students who were shown a white woman’s face. What was most surprising, though, was the finding that, when tested on what they heard in the lecture, listeners shown the Asian woman’s photo did not do as well, indicating their comprehension was reduced by what they perceived to be an accent.
Other studies have found a similar effect. For example, in his dissertation research, linguistics PhD student Ethan Kutlu asked students to transcribe recorded sentences, all of which were spoken in one of three native English varieties (British, American, and Indian). While listening to the recording, students saw a photo of either a person who appeared to be white or a person who appeared to be South Asian.
People who saw a South Asian person’s photo rated the voice as more accented, regardless of which variety of English they actually heard, compared to their ratings when they saw a white person while hearing the same voice. More strikingly though, seeing the South Asian person's photo affected how well the students were able to transcribe the audio. In other words, just seeing a photo of someone they expected to have an accent made it harder for them to accurately understand and transcribe what was said. These results add to earlier research that found seeing photos of Asian Canadians also affected how accented and intelligible listeners perceived native speakers' voices to be. Accent hallucination!
While a number of studies suggest accent hallucination occurs because people’s stereotypes cause them to hear phantom accents, researchers have also hypothesized that such effects are a byproduct of the extra work the brain needs to do when encountering a perceived mismatch between what you see and what you hear. In other words, the fact that the voice did not match the potentially biased expectations triggered by the photo increased the amount of cognitive processing a person had to do — and diverted peoples’ attention away from the material covered or the words to transcribe.
A trustworthy accent
If just looking like you could have an accent has negative consequences, what about people who do in fact have an accent? Is there evidence that processing costs might also play a role in how non-native speakers are evaluated? Some research suggests the answer is yes — finding, for example, that hearing something unfamiliar like a non-native accent can have unexpected and detrimental consequences, like leading people to find a non-native speaker less trustworthy.
In a 2010 study, psychologists Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar asked listeners to rate the truthfulness of trivia statements like "ants don’t sleep" when recited by both native and non-native speakers. When non-native speakers made the statements, people rated those speakers as less credible — even when that accent was mild. Statements from people with heavier non-native accents were rated even lower on truthfulness.
Although bias or prejudice against non-native speakers still plays a key part and may condition speaker expectations, as with the studies on accent hallucination, researchers speculate that processing costs might also be playing a role in the lower credibility ratings in this study. Maybe the lower ratings were because of the extra work required in parsing non-native speech, since a lot of research suggests that unexpected or unfamiliar voices take more effort to process. In other words, people might be misconstruing the harder time they have understanding someone with an accent as indicating something about the speaker instead — that, for example, the person is less trustworthy.
How can we improve?
So how can we do better? Fortunately, we are fast and flexible learners. When listeners receive more information about non-native accents or training with non-native accents, they seem to process it more easily.
Two things seem to help listeners adapt to different accents: One, more exposure to non-native speech and, two, more information about what to expect when they are about to hear someone talking.
First, a number of studies find that giving listeners exposure to foreign accented speech can help increase comprehension when they later hear someone with that accent. Just being familiar with the accent reduces the amount of cognitive processing a listener has to do and can decrease problems like finding accented speakers less credible. Of course this only works when the cause of the processing difficulty is due to unfamiliarity and not when underlying prejudice makes a listener simply less willing to make the processing effort.
Second, research has also suggested that merely giving listeners more information about what to expect, for example telling them that the speaker has a specific type of accent, such as a Chinese accent or a French accent, can help listeners adapt more quickly (Vaughn 2019). This is probably because there is less of a mismatch between a listener’s expectation and what they actually hear, which might be responsible for the at least some of the results found in the accent hallucination experiments we talked about earlier.
Likewise, when subjects in the trustworthiness study were told that processing difficulty can affect the believability of non-native speech before the rating task, people with mild accents no longer took a hit on trustworthy ratings compared to native speakers. This suggests that this type of additional information can indeed help listeners recognize that it's their processing difficulty, and not a speaker’s credibility, that is at play.
More diverse social networks also seem to decrease the likelihood that people will hallucinate an accent or have problems with intelligibility. For instance, in the transcription task where students were shown the face of a South Asian person or a white person, students who said they had more diversity in their social networks were better at transcribing the sentences.
And finally, encouraging listeners to have a growth mindset, for example by telling them that their ability to understand will improve, may also be a way to improve communication and understanding between native and non-native speakers.
In short, it does appear that priming a positive mindset and giving listeners more contextual information about who they are listening to can go quite far in decreasing the negative outcomes from accent bias for both listeners and speakers.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of the forthcoming book, Like, Literally Dude, about all the speech habits we love to hate. She is also a language expert for "Psychology Today" where she writes a monthly blog, Language in the Wild. You can find her at valeriefridland.com or on Twitter at @FridlandValerie. (And in case you were wondering, ants do actually sleep. Apparently, they take a lot of naps.)
——————
False Ranges
By Rhiannon Root
Have you ever needed to convey how much something grew? Have you ever needed to tell someone how long you did something? If so, you’ve probably needed to use a range.
A range describes a relationship between two extremes. If the term sounds familiar, you might have heard it in math class along with terms like “median” and “mode.” Ranges function similarly in grammar — they show us contrast within a set. They’re often used to convey things like size and duration. Ranges can also show progression over time.
For example, “Squiggly worked from dawn to dusk on his school project.” “Penguins range in size from the 2-pound little blues to the 90-pound emperors.” “The price increased from $4 to $7.50.” “Aardvark traveled from Omaha, Nebraska, to Nairobi, Kenya, for his vacation.”
One of the tell-tale signs that you're dealing with a range is seeing the words “from” and “to.” Almost always you’ll see the “from” in front and the “to” between two nouns. Otherwise, you’ll probably see the word "range" itself.
For example, “Aardvark’s vocal range is two octaves.”
Seems like a relatively simple and easy piece of guidance to follow, right? Well, you might be surprised. Enter the false range!
Lisa McLendon, who runs the Bremner Editing Center at the University of Kansas journalism school defines the false range as the construction "everything from X to Y" or "ranging from X to Y" "that throws in a couple of items to show diversity." She says, "The problem is that most of these items don’t fall along a real continuum, a Point-A-to-Point-B line, hence the appellation ‘false’ for the range.”
Much like the arrow inside the FedEx logo, once you see one false range, you’ll see them everywhere.
For example, “The lawmakers tried everything to address the budget shortfall, from cutting spending, to raising taxes to holding a bake sale.” “Diana can do it all, from sweeping the floors, to organizing the spice rack, to swimming laps.” “Aardvark had everything in his music collection from smooth jazz, to '90s pop music, to Norwegian death metal.”
If you scratched your head at those examples and asked, “Wait, what?” now you know the problem with false ranges. The problem, first and foremost, is that it’s confusing at first glance.
What do you do if you find a false range in your own writing? How do you fix it?
False ranges are easy to fix once you know what the swap is. But first, you need to ask yourself what you’re trying to convey and who the intended audience is. McLendon recommends using “variety” or “including” instead.
Here's one of those sentences with a false range again: "The lawmakers tried everything to address the budget shortfall, from cutting spending, raising taxes, and holding a bake sale."
Here's a better way that uses the word "including": "The lawmakers tried several different strategies to address the budget shortfall, including cutting spending, raising taxes, and holding a bake sale."
Instead of "Diana can do it all, from sweeping the floors, to organizing the spice rack, to swimming laps."
You could say something like "Diana has a variety of skills, she can sweep the floors, organize the spice rack, and swim three laps."
And if you want to show that Aardvark has diverse taste in music, instead of saying, "Aardvark had everything in his music collection from smooth jazz, to '90s pop music, to Norwegian death metal."
You could say, "Aardvark has a vast collection of music; it includes smooth jazz, '90s pop music, and even Norwegian death metal."
False ranges and their fixes are considered slightly old-fashioned among editors, but occasionally, false ranges are hotly debated. If you want to watch a fight break out among a group of editors, try yelling, “False ranges are great!”
For example, a Q&A from an editor at the Chicago Manual of Style has this to say about false ranges, “Remember that overuse of the device can annoy readers. Know too that persnickety readers dislike ‘false ranges,’ although they are an accepted figure of speech. A ‘true range’ is something like ‘from A to Z’; a false range is ‘from [cellphones] to coffeemakers,’ where there are no logical endpoints to form a range.”
More tellingly, The Associated Press Stylebook doesn’t have a proper entry on false ranges. Its entry on ranges is even thinner than the Q&A from the Chicago Manual of Style, but there are a few Ask an Editor entries. What’s particularly odd and frustrating about this absence is that ideas about range in language are primarily from people in journalism and mass media. And what’s worse? Often wire stories from AP contain false ranges.
For those in favor of keeping false ranges, they’ll often say that almost everyone knows what you mean if you say, “Meryl Streep has such range!” or “a range of basic goods and services” and that it’s an acceptable figure of speech.
For those in favor of removing them, they’ll say that false ranges can be confusing and distracting. Not all readers have an easy time understanding figurative language, either. The late Bill Walsh of The Washington Post described false ranges as a “tired device” and challenged writers to be more creative.
Ultimately, the question you have to ask yourself in your own writing is “Will this make sense for my intended audience?”
In any case, you have a range of options to choose from. Oops, a variety of options to choose from.
That segment was written by Rhiannon Root, a long-time copy editor based in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter as @rhiannonroot.
Finally, I have a familect story.
"Hi, I have a family story about my mom, who's a great storyteller, not always a great story listener. If we're talking about something, we'll start with the topic like, let's say that Luke and Leia from the Star Wars movies were twins. And then we'll get further into the story. Who's their parents? Who are they related to? Who's the uncle, who's the dad, who's the mom? My mom will join in and say, and what's better than all that is, they're twins! And, of course, we'd already said that. So at that point we'll turn to my mother and say, "Yeah, thanks, Chris." Referring, of course, to Christopher Columbus who discovered something that was already there."
Thanks so much. I think many of us have someone like that in our family, and that little quip makes me laugh. "Thanks, Chris."
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to my audio engineer Nathan Semes and my editor Adam Cecil who finished 17th out of 30 in his first season as a LearnedLeague competitor. Good job, Adam! Our ad operations specialist is Morgan Christianson, our digital operations specialist is Holly Hutchings, and our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. You can find me on Twitter as @GrammarGirl and on Instagram as @TheGrammarGirl. That's all. Thanks for listening.
----
The following items were not in the audio. They are provided for reference.
Sources for the Accent Hallucination segment by Valerie Fridland
Babel, M., & Russell, J. (2015). Expectations and speech intelligibility. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137(5), 2823–2833.
Bradlow, A. R., and Bent, T. (2008). Perceptual adaptation to non-native
Speech. Cognition 106(2), 707–729.
Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don't we believe non-native speakers? the influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093-1096:
Rubin, D.L. 1992. Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates' judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Res High Educ 33, 511–531
Vaughn C. R. (2019). Expectations about the source of a speaker's accent affect accent adaptation. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145(5), 3218.
Sources for the False Range segment by Rhiannon Root
Walsh, B. "Everything's Ranging." The Slot. https://www.theslot.com/range.html (accessed September 1, 2022).
Grammar Monkeys (McLendon, L.). "Home, home on the range." Madam Grammar. May 20, 2010. https://madamgrammar.com/tag/false-range/ (accessed September 1, 2022).
McIntyre, J. "Getting the range." You Don't Say. February 10, 2010. http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2010/02/getting-range.html (accessed September 1, 2022).
"Commas." The Chicago Manual of Style (Q&A), 17th edition. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Commas/faq0062.html (accessed September 1, 2022).
Corbett, P.B. "Everything from this to that." After Deadline: New York Times Blog. August 24, 2010. https://archive.nytimes.com/afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/everything-from-this-to-that/ (accessed September 1, 2022).
"Appendix." SeaWorld. https://seaworld.org/animals/all-about/penguins/appendix/ (accessed September 1, 2022).