Date of Submission
Spring 2020
Academic Program
Psychology
Project Advisor 1
Stuart Stritzler-Levine
Abstract/Artist's Statement
The previous studies have shown that people make different decisions not only after reading and also listening to moral dilemmas in a foreign language (L2) than in a native language (L1). This effect is named Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE). Emotion, which is considered to play a pivotal role in moral judgments, is also found to have a close interaction with sounds. The current research aims to (1) investigate whether the sound of different languages (i.e. accents) can also trigger the MFLE in listeners’ moral decision-making and (2) examine the foreign accent effect on listeners’ moral reasoning pattern. Chinese ESL college students were recruited as listeners of Chinese-accented and English-accented speech of moral dilemmas in Mandarin and English. However, although the study revealed a potential foreign accent effect on moral reasoning patterns in native-accented Chinese and foreign-accented Chinese, contradicting our predictions, a foreign accent effect on moral decisions and moral reasoning patterns was not detected. Neither the higher proficiency in L2 was found associated with moral reasoning patterns employed in L2-sounding speech. With potential explanations of the results, and future improvements and research directions in moral psychology are also discussed.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Gu, Yifan, "The Way You Hear It, the Way You Judge It: Moral Decision-making and Moral Reasoning in Accented Speech" (2020). Senior Projects Spring 2020. 248.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020/248
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