Evaluation of Personality Content from Accented Speech as a Function of Listeners' Social Attitudes

By means of the ‘matched-guise’ technique, 20 highly and 20 lowly ethnocentric listeners evaluated the personalities of British ‘standard’ (R.P.) and British ‘nonstandard’ regional speakers (S. Welsh and Somerset) across 18 bipolar-adjective traits. The results showed that the highly ethnocentric Ss rated the regional speakers less favourably, but the R.P. speakers more favourably than the lowly ethnocentric on competence traits of personality. However, with regard to traits related to social attractiveness and personal integrity, the lowly ethnocentric sample rated all voices (standard and nonstandard) more favourably than the highly ethnocentric sample