Real-time evaluations of British accents: The effect of social and psychological factors on judgements of professional competence
We report results of an experiment designed to investigate dynamic evaluations of different British accents, focusing on how the moment-to-moment trajectories of perceptual responses contribute to the overall evaluative profile of a speech variety. Data are drawn from a verbal guise experiment in which British listeners (n=160) provided real-time evaluations of the interview performance of two “candidates” for entry-level positions at corporate law firms. The candidates were native speakers of Received Pronunciation, the national standard, or Multicultural London English, a non-standard London variety. GAMM modelling and Change Points Analyses reveal systematic perceptual variability along three main axes: 1) broad-based differences across the accents, 2) differences as a function of specific listener characteristics, and 3) differences in the relative contextual salience of particular accent features. We discuss the interrelationships between these different levels of analysis, and the ways linguistic, social and psychological factors all constrain perceptual reactions to accents in real-time.
