This is their second science. I'm Lucy Wong.

About 1.5 billion people speak English around the world,

but for more than 1.1 billion of them, English is their second language, often with a noticeable

accent.

Your accent really reveals a lot about who you are in your identity.

It will tell people what your native language is, be able to tell you probably where you come from.

Mark Pell, a communications professor of McGill University in Montreal.

And according to Pell, one reaction to a different accent can be a bias against that person.

Previous research that has been done elsewhere showed that people who have an accent tend to be trusted less simply because they have an accent.

But the idea that we would have a bias against anyone who sort of doesn't sound like us,

I think probably relates to some sort of evolutionary or long-standing suspicion

we have of outsiders or strangers.

So this might be sort of an ingrained response that we have to the accent.

But accents aren't the only thing we listen for when we have to decide if we trust another person.

Tone of voice also plays a role.

Pell and his team wanted to know if people would trust a confident tone,

even if it came from someone with an accent.

The researchers had Canadian English speakers

listened to different versions of people saying

neutral statements like she has access to the building while they were getting a brain

scan in an MRI machine.

Subjects heard someone say it with a confident neutral tone with a Canadian English

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