When popular villains in cartoon shows and movies speak in foreign-accented English, the young children watching the conniving depictions also seem to pick up language biases, Canadian researchers say.

From the British voices of Scar in The Lion King and Captain Cook in Peter Pan to the Eastern European-sounding Gru, the supervillain-turned-hero of the Despicable Me franchise — notably absent from the latest installment opening in theatres Wednesday — “non-standard and foreign accents” have long served as a shorthand for moral character.

Recently, University of Toronto psychology professor Elizabeth Johnson co-authored a study in the peer-reviewed Child Development journal that analyzed more than 100 popular children’s films and TV shows and revealed the negative impact of accents being used disproportionately to indicate sinister characters.

“We were the first to actually see if kids internalize this,” said Johnson. “These biases first appear at the age of three in the studies that we’ve done, and they grow stronger with age.”

The findings matter, Johnson said, given that associating certain accents with negative stereotypes, like being less trustworthy or less intelligent, can negatively impact people’s lives. Implicit bias can also affect how someone is evaluated for a job or housing.

In the first part of the study, researchers had 95 children across the Greater Toronto Area, aged seven to nine, and their parents compile a list of their favourite animated films or TV shows.

What they found is that in both the children and parents’ favourites, “non-standard accents” were underrepresented, and when they did appear, they tended to be used for a villainous role or a character with a negative trait.

Next, Johnson played video clips of the same actor using different accents and asked the participants which voice they preferred for a hero and which voice they preferred for a villain. Both kids and parents were more likely to choose foreign accents for scoundrels. 

In the final part of the investigation, the researchers repeated the second experiment with two groups of kids, those around five years old and those around 13 years old. Children’s language biases seemed to increase with age, with the older children more likely to associate foreign accents with villains.

It’s “pretty suggestive evidence,” Johnson said, though she was quick to acknowledge the findings are simply correlations.

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One aim of Johnson’s ongoing research into accents in cartoons is to see whether having kids watch more positive portrayals of accents can make a difference, she said, pointing to shows like on Octonauts and Peppa Pig.

The cast of the ocean-themed show features a mix of British, American and Australian accents, while the family of pigs speak with an accent common across England. 

“Octonauts is fabulous. They have such great representation,” Johnson said. “Things like Minions, they have fairly positive portrayal.”

Advancing grasp of accents

The animated accent research reflects not just how we use speech to convey information, but also to signal who we are and where we come from, said Janet Werker, a University of British Columbia psychology professor who was not involved in the cartoon study. 

Werker’s own lab focuses on infant speech perception in monolingual, bilingual and multilingual babies. She’s discovered that by 11 months of age, babies in Vancouver have specific expectations about who is going to speak what language. 

“An English monolingual learning baby will expect an East Asian face to speak either English or Cantonese, but will not expect them to speak Spanish.”

It’ll be important to build on Johnson’s envelope-pushing findings by examining how children’s accent preferences play out in social settings like child care, Werker said.  

“There has been some work done that shows … babies will be more likely to take a toy from somebody who speaks their own language, so there’s just more comfort and trust there.” 

Perhaps having children play together with a friend or parent present during the interaction could help build familiarity, Werker suggested. 

Importantly, Johnson’s results add to the body of research showing how sensitive children are to what’s familiar to them, said Krista Byers-Heinlein, the Concordia University Research Chair in Bilingualism and Open Science. 

“We are lucky for our linguistic diversity here in Canada and that’s definitely something to embrace,” said Byers-Heinlein, who studies how infants who grow up in bilingual environments in Montreal acquire two languages simultaneously.

“But I think what this research shows is that there are nonetheless challenges.”

Results were surprise to study author

Johnson said she expected children growing up in more homogenous environments would show bias, but she was shocked to find that was also the case in Toronto, where, in 2021, nearly half of residents spoke a language other than English or French at home — Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Spanish and Tamil being the most common.

“I didn’t think kids in the GTA would have these biases because I thought they were exposed to so much language variation, [I thought] that the biases were really more of an American thing.”