Would you respect a norm if it sounds foreign? Foreign-accented speech affects decision-making processes.

Does listening to a foreign-accented speaker bias native speakers' behavior? We investigated whether the accent, i.e., a foreign accent versus a native accent, in which a social norm is presented affects native speakers' decision to respect the norm (Experiments 1 and 2) and the judgement for not respecting it (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, we presented 128 native Spanish speakers with new social norms, adapted from the measures imposed by the Spanish Government to fight the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., 'To avoid the spread of the Covid-19 virus, keep your distance'), whereas in Experiment 2, we presented 240 native Spanish speakers with everyday social norms learned from childhood (e.g., 'Not littering on the street or in public places'), that have an intrinsic cultural and linguistic link. In Experiment 1, the norms were uttered either in a native accent, or in a foreign accent unfamiliar to our participants to avoid stereotypes. In Experiment 2, we added an accent negatively perceived in Spain to assess the role of language attitudes on decision making. Overall, accent did not directly impact participants' final decisions, but it influenced the decision-making process. The factors that seem to underlie this effect are emotionality and language attitudes. These findings add up to the recent Foreign Accent effect observed on moral judgements and further highlight the role of the speaker's identity in decision making.

The VIDAS Data Set: A Spoken Corpus of Migrant and Refugee Spanish Learners.

The VIDAS data set (Verbal Interaction Dataset of Acquired Spanish) presents data from 200 participants from different countries and language backgrounds (50 Philippines with L1 Tagalog; 50 Ukrainians with L1 Ukrainian; 50 Moroccans with L1Arabic; 50 Romanians with L1 Romanian). They completed an oral expression and interaction test in the context of a Spanish certification exam for adult migrants. The aim of the VIDAS data set is to provide researchers in psycholinguistics and second language acquisition with a Spanish spoken corpus of traditionally marginalized and underrepresented learners, providing a compelling data set of oral interactions by migrants and refugees. The corpus contains more than 29 h of recordings of the oral interactions of the participants with trained interviewers, as well as background information about the participants (age, gender, maximum education level, years of residence, and language background). It furthermore contains the scores obtained by the participants in the oral expression and interaction exam. The VIDAS corpus allows for the development of studies on L2 spoken language comprehension and processing, as well as for comparative analyses of language acquisition between different L1 groups at different linguistic levels.