Employment interviewers' reactions to Mexican American speech

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Abstract
Employment interviewers at large businesses in San Antonio, Texas, listened to taped speech samples of Mexican American males speaking English with varying degrees of accentedness in simulated employment interviews, evaluated speaker personality characteristics, and made a hiring prediction about whether each speaker might be hired for each of three level positions: supervisor, skilled technician, and semi‐skilled worker. Measures of interviewers’ degree of expectations (stereotypes), exposure, and language attitudes related to Mexican Americans were set in a multiple regression equation predicting hiring decisions. Results indicated that together, expectations, exposure and language attitudes did account for a significant amount of the variance for hiring predictions. The individual predictive power of each variable varied according to position. For supervisor, a measure of reactions to actual speech stimuli was the only significant individual predictor. For skilled technician, scores from each variable cluster proved significant, while for semi‐skilled worker, expectations and language attitudes were significant predictors. Language attitudes dropped off in importance with each level, confirming previous findings of the importance of language evaluations for higher level positions. Standard speakers were significantly favored (p <.001) for supervisor, while accented speakers were favored (p <.001) for semi‐skilled worker.

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