What happens when cartoon villains have an accent? UTM research reveals impact on kids

When kids watch cartoons, they’re absorbing much more than a plot. 

Thanks to the use of foreign accents in shows, they’re also learning a shorthand for moral character, new research from the University of Toronto Mississauga suggests. 

From the British voices of Peter Pan’s Captain Hook and The Lion King’s Scar, to the Eastern European Gru in the Minions universe, foreign accents have appeared for generations in North American children’s shows to indicate characters considered suspicious and sinister.

While foreign accents as tropes in children’s media have been studied in the past, Professor Elizabeth Johnson and former postdoc Thomas St. Pierre, who is now an assistant professor at Utrecht University, wanted to know whether such patterns still persisted and – more significantly – whether they might actually be affecting kids’ attitudes. 

Their investigation, recently published in the journal Child Development, indicates children are clearly developing internal biases and those more exposed to such accents in their favourite shows are more likely to associate foreign accents with villains. 

“It’s the strongest evidence we have that the media exposure is actually affecting kids' attitudes,” said Johnson, a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at UTM.

Working with UTM undergraduates, Johnson and St. Pierre first studied whether the use of foreign or “non-standard” accents was still present in animated North American children’s media. The team analyzed 105 films and series that seven to eight-year-olds in the Greater Toronto Area had reported watching.

“What we found is that the bias was still strong, if not stronger,” said Johnson.

Then, in a lab experiment, children were told that they were helping to choose voice actors for a new cartoon. They were asked which voice would be better suited to a “hero” or a “villain.” 

Foreign accents were overwhelmingly chosen by the subjects to represent negative characters, the experiment found.

“It surprised me that the strength of the bias in cartoons actually predicted the strength of the bias that was shown by kids in the lab,” said Johnson. 

The fact that the study was conducted in the Greater Toronto Area made their findings especially striking – the region is one of the most linguistically diverse in the world, where many children grow up hearing a range of accents in their homes, classrooms and communities. 

In fact, the researchers initially thought the area’s diversity might weaken the experiment, said Johnson. 

“We thought, if there’s any place where this bias wouldn’t be so strong, it would be here. But in fact, it doesn’t matter,” she said. Even children with two parents who spoke with foreign accents still showed the bias, Johnson said.

That matters because accent bias goes beyond cartoons. 

Research has shown that adults with foreign accents can face lower teaching evaluations, barriers in housing and employment, as well as assumptions about competence in the workplace, Johnson said. 

Her own work with children has also found that they tend to prefer local-accented speakers when asked who would make a better teacher or friend.

“There has been a huge focus on improving gender and racial representations in media, but virtually nothing about accents,” said Johnson. 

For parents, Johnson does not suggest policing screen time. Instead, she said families should be aware of the patterns and ask questions. 

“Kids don’t understand it in the same way that we as adults do,” she said. “It's not something they can talk about explicitly.”

Johnson believes that a bigger responsibility lies with the media industry and producers of kids' programming. 

“Children’s media is a reflection of society and our attitudes,” she said. “It’s also not just in children’s media, you see it in adult media too.”

The researchers are now looking at the flip side of their research: whether positive portrayals of accented characters in shows can help undo some of the bias other cartoons reinforce. 

While their work is still in progress, it points to the possibility that media could be part of the solution.

“Positive portrayals might actually mitigate those biases,” Johnson said.