Attitudes and Evaluational Reactions to Accented English Speech

Webster, William G.; Kramer, Ernest

doi:10.1080/00224545.1968.9712498

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Triandis (1971) states that little research has been done on their respective validities. On the other band, Webster and Kramer (1968) found an inverted U-shaped relationship between degree of prejudice towards French Canadians and evaluational reactions to a French Canadian guise. Lambert (1967: 94) Claims that the matched-guise technique "appears to reveal judges' more private reactions to the contrasting group than direct attitude questionnaires do, but much more research is needed to adequately assess its power in this regard".…”

Section: The Measurement Of Attitüdementioning

confidence: 92%

The Study of Language Attitudes

COOPER¹,

Fishman²

1974

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

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Attitüde has served äs a variable in many sociolinguistic studies (for a methodological and topical review, see Agheyisi and Fishman, 1970; for a recent compendium, see Shuy and Fasold, 1973). This has been true in part because attitude is a central concept in the social sciences generally and in part because sociolinguistic phenomena are complex enough to motivate a search for equally complex predictive hypothetical constructs. Thus, for example, language attitude appears äs a catalyst for a sound change (Labov, 1963), a defining characteristic of a speech Community (Labov, 1966), a predictor of second-language achievement (Anisfeld and Lambert, 1961; Lambert, Gardner, Barik, and Tunstall, 1963;Lambert, Gardner, Olton, and Tunstall, 1968), a reflection of interethnic attitudes (Herman, 1961;Lambert, Anisfeld, and Yeni-Komshian, 1965), a determinant of interlingual intelligibility (Wolff, 1959), and a determinant of teachers' perceptions of their pupils' ability (Seligman, Lambert, and Tucker, 1972).While it is not remarkable that language attitude appears äs a variable in sociolinguistic studies, it is surprising that the work of attitude theorists on the one band and the work of sociolinguists on the other should have been conducted in relative Isolation from one another. Sociolinguistic investigators' use of attitude äs a variable has proceeded largely without reference to issues in the theory and measurement of attitudes, and the procedures and data developed by sociolinguists have been largely ignored by attitude theorists. This mutual Isolation is unfortunate because each research tradition can benefit from the other. Sociolinguistic behavior can serve äs a rieh source of data against which attitude theories can be tested. Moreover, some of the attitude measure-1 This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper prepared for the Interna-

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Section: The Measurement Of Attitüdementioning

confidence: 92%

The Study of Language Attitudes

COOPER¹,

Fishman²

1974

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

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“…The matched guise technique, which was developed at McGill University by Lambert, Hodgeson, Gardner, and Fillenbaum (1960), is a subjective reaction test used to reveal how people feel about characteristics of others based solely on tape-recorded speech of individuals who are bilingual or bidialectal (Anisfeld, Bogo, & Lambert, 1962;Webster & Kramer, 1968). Subjects indicate twice (once to each guise) how they react to each trait for each speaker by marking a scale divided into any odd number of segments.…”

Section: Materials and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attitudes of Native and Nonnative Speakers toward Selected Regional Accents of U.S. English

Alford¹,

Strother²

1990

TESOL Quarterly

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Although some research has been done on the attitudes of native speakers of English toward various regional varieties of U.S. English, few studies have been done on nonnative speakers' reactions toward regional accents. This empirical investigation sought to determine the attitudes of both L1 and L2 listeners toward specific regional accents of U.S. English and to compare and/or contrast those attitudes. The subjects were 97 university students from Florida Institute of Technology, half of whom were L2 listeners (advanced ESL students) and half of whom were L1 listeners. Through the use of a modification of the matched guise technique, the students listened to tapes of the same passage read by a male and female native speaker from each of the following accent groups: (a) southern (South Carolina), (b) northern (New York), and (c) Midwestern (Illinois). Respondents then recorded their attitudes about each of the readers using a Likert scale. The results indicated that the judgments of L2 subjects differed from those of L1 subjects and that L2 subjects were able to perceive differences in regional accents of U.S. English.

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“…In evaluating the reactions of listeners to accented speech, previous research has compared standard English to "Jewish-accented" English (Anisfeld, Bogo, & Lambert, 1962), French Canadian accented English (Webster & Kramer, 1968), and MexicanAmerican accented English (Ryan & Carranza, 1975), as well as Australian English to Greek-accented Australian English (Callan, Gallois, & Forbes, 1983). In general, each of these studies found that the more the speaker departs from standard speech, the more the listener denigrates him or her.…”

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Evaluations of Spanish- And Oriental-Accented English Speakers

1990

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The study investigated the evaluations received by individuals who speak English with a Spanish or Oriental accent. The judges in the study were 134 American college students (60 males, 74 females) who listened to one of six different audiotapes containing the speech sample of an individual (male or female) who spoke either unaccented English, Spanish -accented English, or Oriental-accented English. The speech samples were matched for degree of accent, intensity level, and speech rate. After listening to a tape, each judge was asked to rate the speaker using 16 personality scales. The results of a multivariate analysis of variance did not support the hypothesis that accented speakers are perceived as having less positive traits; however, significant main effects for gender of speaker and gender of judge, as well as a significant interaction between type of speech and gender of judge, were found.

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Attitudes and Evaluational Reactions to Accented English Speech

Cited by 17 publications

References 7 publications

The Study of Language Attitudes

The Study of Language Attitudes

Attitudes of Native and Nonnative Speakers toward Selected Regional Accents of U.S. English

Evaluations of Spanish- And Oriental-Accented English Speakers

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