Accents of Guilt?

Abstract

This study examined the effect of regional accent on the attribution of guilt. One hundred and nineteen participants listened to a recorded exchange between a British male criminal suspect and a male policeman. Employing the “matched-guise” technique, this exchange was varied to produce a 2 (accent type: Birmingham/standard) 2 (race of suspect: Black/White) 2 (crime type: blue collar/white collar) independent-groups design. The results suggested that the suspect was rated as significantly more guilty when he employed a Birmingham rather than a standard accent and that attributions of guilt were significantly associated with the suspect’s perceived superiority and social attractiveness.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Dixon, J. A. , Tredoux, C. G. , Durrheim, K. , & Foster, D. H. (1994). The role of speech accommodation and crime type in attribution of guilt. Journal of Social Psychology, 134, 465-473.

Giles, H. (1970). Evaluative reactions to accents. Educational Review, 22, 211-227.

Giles, H. , Baker, S. , & Fielding, G. (1975). Communication length as a behavioral index of accent prejudice. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 6, 73-81.

Giles, H. , & Bourhis, R. Y. (1976). Methodological issues in dialect perception: A social psychological perspective. Anthropological Linguistics, 19, 294-304.

Giles, H. , & Coupland, N. (1991). Language: Contexts and consequences. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press.

Giles, H. , Hewstone, M. , Ryan, E. , & Johnson, P. (1987). Research on language attitudes. In H. Ammon , N. Dittmar , & K. J. Mattheier (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society (Vol.1, pp.585-597). New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Giles, H. , & Powesland, P. F. (1975). Speech evaluation and social evaluation. London: Academic Press.

Gordon, R. A. (1993). The effects of strong versus weak evidence on the assessment of race stereotypic and race nonstereotypic crimes. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 23, 734-749.

Gordon, R. C. A. , Michels, J. L. , & Nelson, C. L. (1996). Majority perceptions of criminal behavior: The accuracy of race-related crime stereotypes. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26, 148-159.

10.

Kalin, R. (1982). The social significance of speech in medical, legal and occupational settings. In E. B. Ryan & H. Giles (Eds.), Attitudes towards language variation: Social and applied contexts (pp. 148-163). London: Arnold.

11.

Mazzella, R. , & Feingold, A. (1994). The effects of physical attractiveness, race, socioeconomic status, and gender of defendants and victims on judgments of mock jurors: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24, 1315-1344.

12.

Seggie, I. (1983). Attribution of guilt as a function of ethnic attitude and type of crime. Journal of Multicultural and Multilingual Development, 4, 197-206.

13.

Shapiro, S. (1990). Collaring the crime, not the criminal: Reconsidering the concept of white-collar crime. American Sociological Review, 55, 346-365.

14.

Sunnafrank, M. , & Fontes, N. E. (1983). General and crime related racial stereotypes and influence on juridic decisions. Cornell Journal of Social Relations, 17, 1-15.

15.

Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English I: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

16.

Zahn, C. J. , & Hopper, R. (1985). Measuring language attitudes: The Speech Evaluation Instrument. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 4, 113-124.