Advancing Insights Into Accent Diversity and Its Interplay With Multicultural Experiences

ABSTRACT Accents are sociocultural markers that signal identity and influence communication, and multicultural individuals may be more likely to encounter a variety of accents across different languages. This article reviews and integrates research on the psychology of accent and multicultural experiences. We first examine the social and communicative meanings of accents for multicultural individuals. Specifically, we discuss accents as cues for multicultural frame‐switching and examine how accent switching, a form of multicultural frame‐switching, facilitates multicultural communication. Next, we discuss how multicultural experiences shape accent attitudes. We analyze both positive outcomes, such as increased acceptance of accent diversity, and negative outcomes, such as reinforcement of accent hierarchies. We conclude by outlining promising avenues for future research to enhance our knowledge of accent diversity and multicultural experiences, with the goal of encouraging a more systematic exploration of this important and understudied topic.