How accents are perceived?

The perception of accents is normal within any given group of language users and involves the categorisation of speakers into social groups and entails judgments about the accented speaker, including their status and personality.

What factors influence accents?

The literature review suggested that a wide variety of variables influence degree of foreign accent. These variables include age of L2 learning, length of residence in an L2-speaking country, gender, formal instruction, motivation, language learning aptitude and amount of native language (L1) use.

What are sociolinguistic stereotypes?

Defining stereotypes as distillations of types of persons and practices expressive of ideological meanings and integral to power relations, a sociolinguistics study of stereotyping is proposed as encompassing a number of dimensions: the constitutiveness of language, discourse and genre; flatness and roundedness of …

Why do people judge others based on accent?

“Specifically, it adds to evidence that the speech brain is sensitive to – and primed by – speech articulation, whether heard or seen. It also adds to the evidence that a familiar talker’s speaking style can help us recognize words.”

How does accent affect perception?

When we hear a certain type of accent, we’ll automatically pin a label on the person speaking and file them away into what we perceive to be their social status or category. In fact, scientists have now learned that visual cues actually come second when people are categorizing others.

What are language attitudes in sociolinguistics?

Language attitudes are opinions, ideas and prejudices that speakers have with respect to a language. For example, it is often said that in order to learn a language, it often helps to have a positive attitude towards that language.

What are the different attitudes to language?

Language attitudes are organized along two evaluative dimensions: status (e.g., intelligent, educated) and solidarity (e.g., friendly, pleasant). Past research has primarily focused on documenting attitudes toward standard and nonstandard language varieties.

Why does my accent change depending on who I talk to?

According to a 2010 study by a research group at the University of California, Riverside, people subconsciously mimic other accents due to a phenomenon called “the chameleon effect”. The chameleon effect describes our human instinct to “empathise and affiliate” with other people.

What is an accent in linguistics?

Word accent (also called word stress, or lexical stress) is part of the characteristic way in which a language is pronounced.