Reactions Toward Varying Degrees of Accentedness in the Speech of Spanish-English Bilinguals

Approximately 100 college students were asked to evaluate Spanish-English bilingual speakers on the basis of taped readings of an English text. The speakers were chosen to represent a wide range of accentedness. The relationship between the amount of accentedness heard and the attributed characteristics of the speaker was investigated. The results show that the students made rather fine discriminations among varying degrees of accentedness in rating a speaker's personal attributes and speech. Support was thus found for the proposition that Spanish-accented English is negatively stereotyped and that the more accented the speech, the stronger the stereotype. By employing a seven-point rating scale with large groups rather than more involved scaling techniques based on individual testing, this study attempted to generalize the results of recent research which indicated that linguistically naive persons can reliably rate varying degrees of accentedness. Indeed, since the more convenient group-administered rating scale procedure provided high correlations with the accentedness scores obtained via more complicated scaling techniques, research concerned with reactions to a range of accentedness can progress rapidly.