Do non-native and unfamiliar accents sound less credible? An examination of the processing fluency hypothesis

Many studies have demonstrated that stimuli that are easy to process are generally better evaluated compared to stimuli that are harder to process. It is, however, an open question whether people speaking with a foreign accent are judged to be less truthful compared to native speakers due to the greater difficulty of decoding their speech. In this paper, we provide new data to this debate by comparing the credibility of speakers of French, both with a familiar or unfamiliar native accent, and with a familiar and unfamiliar foreign accent. Our results indicate that native Native-speakers do not evaluate statements uttered with a foreign-accent as less
truthful compared to a native one.