Attitudes toward Chinese-Accented Speech

This matched-guise study provides data on attitudes toward Mandarin Chinese-accented English by eliciting both Angloand Asian Americans'reactions to a male speaker. Study 1 discovered that in the context ofan employment interview, a speaker of Chinese-accented English was treated no differently than a standard American-accented English counterpart was and thatAsian American listeners were less evaluatively generous when it came to estimations of the speaker's attractiveness than their Anglo-American counterparts were. Study 2 explored the results further and found that the same Chinese-accented speaker was deemed less attractive than the standard American-accented speaker in the context of a college classroom. Tbgether, these studies demonstrate a need to understand better the role played by context in shaping attitudes toward varieties of language.