New Republic Features Accent Study from ICT Researchers

The New Republic covered a recent study led by Morteza Dehghani, from USC’s departments of computer science and psychology, along with ICT researchers Peter Khooshabeh, Angela Nazerian and Jonathan Gratch. The story notes that the study, to be published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, suggests accents can have a meaningful impact on the way we interpret the world. Just listening to a voice with a foreign accent can prime people to see a situation according to the values of the foreign culture, if they have ties to it—or it can reinforce the standards of their own culture, if they’re “monocultural.”
This study, conducted when Dehghani was at ICT, uses virtual humans and was funded by the Army Research Lab.