We Do Not Speak Like This Here: The Role of Perceived Foreignness in Shaping Speaker-Specific Social and Linguistic Inferences

Abstract

People use many kinds of cues that help them navigate social interactions. We examined how perceived foreignness affected people's ability to map speaker-specific naming preferences, align with their interlocutors concerning these preferences, and make social inferences based on them. In a pseudo-interactive experiment, participants engaged with two simulated speakers: one with a common native name who consistently used favored words, and one who consistently used the disfavored alternatives, and had either a native name, a foreign name associated with positive stereotypes (American), or a foreign name associated with negative stereotypes (Former Soviet Union; FSU). We assessed participants’ tendencies to align with each speaker's lexical choices, their ability to generalize disfavored lexical use to other sorts of language use, and the social inferences they drew about each speaker. Results showed that perceived foreignness modulated both linguistic alignment and social judgments. The alignment effect was larger for FSU and native speakers compared to the American speakers. Interestingly, this stemmed from the increased tendency to use the disfavored words with the common native speaker when the uncommon speaker was American, suggesting that speakers’ nationality modulated words’ perceived disfavoredness. Further, generalizations about social traits (e.g., cooperativeness) varied by nationality, with American speakers rated more positively despite similar linguistic behaviors. These findings reveal that foreignness-associated stereotypes can modulate the social consequences of language use, suggesting a bidirectional dynamics where social identity both shapes language processing and is shaped by it. This extends theories of social meaning by demonstrating how social expectations conditionally interact with linguistic behaviors.