How do Koreans judge Korean-accented English? Including the voices of ethnic minorities

Accents are deeply tied to social identity and serve as a basis for discrimination due to unrealistic societal expectations. They convey socio-indexical information about speakers and reflect social hierarchies, leading listeners to make rapid judgments about unfamiliar accents. Consequently, Englishes that are spoken outside of the inner circles are often labeled as “nonstandard” or “foreign,” pressuring individuals with immigrant backgrounds to suppress their identities to conform to dominant norms. Despite the increased awareness and efforts to promote inclusivity in multilingual environments, ethnic minorities remain underexplored in research. To address this gap, this study aims to investigate perceptions of Korean-accented English among Koreans, Korean Americans, and Americans residingeither in South Korea or in the United States. Participants listen to spontaneous speech recorded by speakers of English from different language backgrounds including Korean, Turkish, Hindi, and American English. Next, they complete a comprehensibility task, rate the speakers' accentedness on a continuous scale, and respond to a language attitude questionnaire for each recording. This will be coupled with a social network survey and a language background questionnaire to examine the contextual factors influencing their responses. We predict that Korean Americans will hold the most negative perceptions of Korean-accented English due to the internalization of societal stigma.