Article published In:
Australian Review of Applied LinguisticsVol. 35:1 (2012) ► pp.74–93
Listening between the lines
Social assumptions around foreign accents
This paper investigates the effect of listener attitudes on the ability to understand a foreign (non-Australian) accent. The research focuses on individual listener characteristics, such as attitude and frequency of contact with accented speakers, rather than speech production. Data was collected through a web-based survey and analysis employed both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Correlation was found between a negative attitude toward other ethnicities and ability to correctly transcribe foreign-accented speech, with a stronger correlation between a negative attitude and comprehensibility. Qualitative analysis of participant comments highlighted discrepancies in attitude testing methods and indicated that an accent can inspire many assumptions, the most common being that foreign-accented speakers have a lower level of education than Australian-accented speakers. The results suggest that future research in this area should always try to account for individual participant characteristics.
Keywords: comprehensibility, accent, attitudes, listener characteristics, intelligibility
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
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