This study looks at Received Pronunciation (RP) and Yorkshire accents. There are two hypothesis that will be tested; hypothesis 1: The speaker with the Received Pronunciation accent will receive a significantly higher competence rating than the speaker with the Yorkshire accent, and hypothesis 2: The speaker with the Yorkshire accent will receive a significantly higher social attractiveness rating than the speaker with the RP accent. The null hypothesis 1: There is no difference between competence ratings in the populations from which the samples come (i.e. any difference between sample competence ratings for RP and Yorkshire accents will be down to chance). Null hypothesis 2: there is no difference between social attractiveness ratings in the populations from which the samples come (i.e. any difference between sample social attractiveness ratings for RP and Yorkshire accents will be down to chance).
Method
Design
The experiment used a matched guise technique; this design is used because the same speaker adopted two verbal guises in the form of two accents. The speaker was a thirty-three year old white woman, who read the passage in the same ‘neutral’ style with both accents. The recording lasted for one-minute and fifty-two seconds and the content was a short article from as Huddersfield community newsletter, this was chosen because it is supposedly a less interesting topic so that the speaker did not develop ‘character’ whilst speaking which could influence the experiment. The independent variable is the rating scores and the dependant variable is which accent the person speaks in.
Participants
There were 151 participants in total, 68 of these listened to the RP recorded passage and 83 listened to the Yorkshire recorded passage. The participants were students attending a lecture on a psychology course.
Apparatus/Materials
The apparatus which were used were the tape recorded voices of the speaker reading the same passage first in the RP accent then in the Yorkshire accent, the tape player and the personality questionnaires (see appendix A).
Procedure
Once the students were in the room, the following standardised instructions were given:
Before the tape recording was played:
“Today you will be taking part in an experiment which investigates the accuracy of everyday assessments of personality. In a moment you will hear a tape recording of a woman reading an article from a community newsletter. After listening to the recording you will be given a personality questionnaire which asks you to rate the speaker on ten personality traits. Does everyone understand? Okay, the tape recording is about to begin.”
After the tape recording was played:
“Having listened to the tape recording you should now rate the speaker on the ten personality traits listed on the personality questionnaire. Please read the written instructions on the questionnaire and do not confer with anybody else whilst completing it.”
Once the questionnaires were all collected in the students were all debriefed as to the real purpose of the experiment.
Results
From table 1 shown below we can accept hypothesis 1 that RP will have a higher competence score because RP scored 15.00 and Yorkshire scored 13.12. (To put the mean numbers into perspective and to further understand just how high/low they are, please see Appendix B).
Table 1: COMPETENCE
From the results shown in table 2 we must reject hypothesis 2 because RP is higher than Yorkshire which is not the predicted direction of the hypothesis, it predicted that RP should be lower on social attractiveness.
Table 2: SOCIAL ATTRACTIVENESS
The hypothesis predicted the results would be ‘significantly’ higher rating. Table 3 shows the results are significant:
Table 3: RESULTS OF THE TWO COMPARED
Competence: t = 3.413, df = 149, p = 0.001
Social attractiveness: t = 2.764, df = 149, p = 0.006
Both scores are less than the alpha level (p = <0.05) which makes them significant.
A graph to show the results of the competence ratings for each accent:
A graph to show the results of the social attractiveness ratings for each accent:
Discussion
The basic aim was to see if people perceived people differently because of the accent they spoke in. To test this, two hypothesis were stated; firstly ‘The speaker with the Received Pronunciation accent will receive a significantly higher competence rating than the speaker with the Yorkshire accent’ and secondly ‘The speaker with the Yorkshire accent will receive a significantly higher social attractiveness rating than the speaker with the RP accent’.
The findings show that Received Pronunciation accent scores higher within both factors, which was accepts the first hypothesis but rejects the second hypothesis. The results show significant differences between the two accents.
The results favour the Received Pronunciation accent over the Yorkshire accent. This supports the previous research by Giles where RP was also favoured.
