Accentuating Identities: Investigating Accent Use in the Media and its Impact on the Social Evaluations of Speech

Abstract:

Media influence on accent-based stereotypes and speaker perception is widely acknowledged but lacks empirical investigation (Androutsopoulos, 2014). To explore the effects of media on language-based social evaluations, accent use in media content is first explored with the presentation of the case study ‘A Game of Phones’(Jackson, 2023). This entails an acoustic analysis of Yorkshire English accent performances in the television series, Game of Thrones, alongside a social evaluation task by lay-listeners. 

My PhD research will be employing eye-tracking methods to analysis effects of media exposure on language-based social evaluations towards the Glaswegian Vernacular (GV) accent. A preliminary quantitative content analysis of GV accent portrayals in film will be presented, demonstrating biased accent representations of the vernacular variety that is in line with sociolinguistic theory and the stereotype content model (Fiske et al., 2002; McKenzie & McNeill, 2022). The talk will finally explain how the empirical results of this content analysis will be used to form the experimental stimuli in the eye-tracking experiment, and the considered implications of this unaddressed topic.

Venue: Virtual, please send an e-mail to zas.xtalks@leibniz-zas.de to get the Zoom invitation link. To be let in, use your proper name.

Person description:

Jackson ist a PhD candidate at Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics. In her research, she investigates media effects on implicit sociolinguistic cognition. Jackson is a linguist mainly interested in speech perception, language attitudes, language in the media, media effects, measures of implicit cognition.