THE GIST Many Americans are wary of people who speak with foreign accents.

THE SOURCE “Why Don’t We Believe Non-Native Speakers? The Influence of Accent On Credibility,” The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

ZERE ees a reason ze villain alvays speaks like zees. But it may not be the reason you think. A new study says distrust of those who speak with a foreign accent goes beyond common xenophobia. Apparently, when we don’t understand what someone’s saying, we lose confidence in the speaker altogether.

According to recent research, words and pictures that we can process easily — ones that we don’t have to work to decipher — tend to be perceived as not only more pleasant, clearer and less risky, but also more truthful.

Most data on the subject pertains to the written word. So, for example, if a statement is written in a clear, easy-to-read font, people are more likely to find it true than were it to appear fuzzy, as in a wet newspaper. Likewise, if a statement rhymes (“Woes unite foes”) people are more likely to believe it than if it doesn’t (“Woes unite enemies”).

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Could this simplicity-sincerity effect apply to speech as well? “We both have an accent, so we’re interested in questions about how having an accent impacts you,” Boaz Keysar, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago and an author of the study, explained. He and Shiri Lev-Ari, a postdoctoral researcher and the lead author, were born in Israel .

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The trick is figuring out whether a person’s distrust of non-native speakers stems from prejudice or incomprehension. To tease these factors apart, the researchers designed two experiments. First, they asked a group of 35 people to judge the truthfulness of trivial statements, like “Ants don’t sleep” and “A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can,” recited by people with various accents — Turkish, Polish, Korean, Italian and Austrian-German — as well as native English speakers. In all cases, the subjects were told that the speakers were merely reciting statements provided by the experimenter and were not the source of the material. Yet even when speakers were “only the messenger,” listeners distrusted non-native speakers more than they did native English speakers.