Communicative effectiveness as a function of accented speech

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Five groups of accented seventeen‐year‐olds from Britain were matched for sex, regional membership, and attitude toward capital punishment for murder. These groups were presented with the same persuasive message against capital punishment. Four of the groups heard the message on tape in a different accent produced by a speaker adopting the matched‐guise technique; the fifth group was given a typescript of the message. The results showed that the greater the accent prestige of the communicator's voice, the greater the perceived quality of the argument. Only the nonstandard regional accented messages, however, changed listeners’ attitudes significantly in the predicted direction.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: