Disclaimer 2: The following is an excerpt from page 195 of Deborah Tannen's Talking from 9 to 5: How Women's and Men's Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard, Who Gets Credit, and What Gets Done at Work. I am copying it here because a) I'm under the impression that doing so is fair use, and b) Dr. Tannen can explain it much better than I can. If this is a copyright problem, please let me know nicely in the comments and I'll be happy to remove it. Any typos are my own.
The effect of expectations on comprehension is also supported by research. Speech-communication professor Donald Rubin was concerned with complaints by students at his university that they had trouble understanding foreign-born teachig assistants. Rubin suspected that their preconeptions about foreign-looking speakers being difficult to understand might be playing a powerful role. to test this idea, he tape-recorded a four-minut lecture given by an American-born woman from Ohio, then played the tape to two groups of students at two different times. As the students listended to the leture on tape, they saw projected on a screen a photogrpah of the person they were told was the lecturer. In one case, they saw a photograph of a Caucasian woman, in the other, a Chinese woman. [...] He foundt hat the students wh othought they wer elistening to a Chinese lctruer scored lower on the comprehension test than those who thought they were listening to a white American - and their lower socres were about the same as those for a third group who had heard a lecture given by a real Chinese teaching assistant with a heavy accent.
The first thing this made me think of was Stéphane Dion. A lot of people have been saying lately that his English is insuffcient, which surprises me because it's quite clear that he's thinking in English. As a translator, I have been trained to identify gallicisms in English, so that I may eliminate them and make my French to English translations sound more natural. From what I've heard, Stéphane Dion's English has fewer gallicisms than a bilingual Ottawa anglophone's English. When you can hear all the mistakes he isn't making, it's quite clear that he's either thinking in English, or quite deliberately making a concerted (and successful) effort to give everything he says in English an English syntax.
But people still think he's difficult to understand. Why is that? Idealistic Pragmatist's readers suggest that it's his accent, which it may well be. I listen to French accents all day, so I can't tell you what they sound like to the average anglo. However, I asked some anglos in my life, and they said yes, he does have an accent, but it's not that bad. He's comprehensible. My parents' consensus is that they've had professors with worse accents and learned perfectly well from them.
So bearing all this in mind and then reading Tannen all made me think: what if Dion's English isn't really bad, but people have heard that it's bad and then they're having trouble because they expect it to be bad? This is impossible to test, of course. If someone thinks they don't understand something, then they don't understand it. You can't go around saying, "Oh, you don't really have trouble understanding that, you just think you have trouble understanding it." So if people are suggestable enought, they are actually going to be unable to understand him. I wonder if political strategists know enough about linguistics to do something like this on purpose?
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