Essentialist beliefs about accented speakers moderate the effect of processing fluency on employability ratings

Accented second language (L2) speakers are frequently evaluated less favorably than first language (L1) speakers in employment contexts. Processing fluency (the subjective ease of understanding a speaker) has been identified as an experiential variable that helps explain why L2 speakers tend to receive lower workplace-relevant evaluations. However, less is understood about how processing fluency affects downstream judgments like speaker employability or competence. Drawing on the concept of lay theories, we examined whether listeners' essentialist beliefs about accented and gay-sounding speakers moderated the relationship between processing fluency and employability judgments. We present a post hoc analysis of data from 192 listeners who rated the employability of gay- and straight-sounding L1 and L2 speakers of English. Listeners who more strongly endorsed beliefs that accents are diagnostic of speaker characteristics and amenable to speaker control showed a stronger association between processing fluency and employability ratings. The effect of accent beliefs was most pronounced when the speaker was difficult for listeners to understand, in which case stronger essentialist beliefs were associated with particularly low employability ratings. Essentialist beliefs about gay-sounding men did not moderate the fluency-employability relationship, consistent with the absence of reliable differences in listeners' processing fluency with gay- and straight-sounding speakers in this sample. We provide exploratory evidence that lay theories of what accents reveal about speakers help explain when and for whom processing fluency might affect employment-relevant judgments.