Americans’ attitudes toward British accents: the role of social categorisation, perceived group prototypicality, and processing fluency

The present research examined whether American listeners express different attitudes toward different British accents (i.e. RP, Northern, Scottish, and Welsh) and, if so, which cognitive mechanisms underlie that attitudinal variation. Across two studies, we found that Americans’ attitudes toward British accents were differentiated. RP-accented speakers were consistently rated more favourably than speakers of regional British accents, with some regional accents (e.g. Northern) denigrated more than others (e.g. Scottish). This attitudinal variation was associated with variation in how speakers of different accents were categorised (Study 1), how prototypical of their respective groups they were perceived to be (Study 2), and how much difficulty listeners experienced processing their speech (Studies 1 and 2). These findings contribute to our understanding of language attitudes processes and have methodological implications for the elicitation of language attitudes using audio stimuli.