Accent Bias: Responses to Voices

Continuing our series of posts related to the 'Accent Bias in Britain' project, in this blog post we discuss some findings from our research which investigated current attitudes to accents in Britain.

In the most recent blog post, we explored the findings of the first part of our study which investigated attitudes to accent labels. The second part of our study, detailed here, investigated how people responded to recordings of speakers with different accents to see if the same accent bias exists in speech. 

To examine these questions, we recorded 10 speakers of 5 different accents (2 speakers each). These accents were Multicultural London English (MLE), Estuary English (EE), Received Pronunciation (RP), General Northern English (GNE), and Urban West Yorkshire English (UWYE). Speakers of these accents were recorded reading scripted mock interview answers. 

These recordings were then played to over 1,100 participants aged between 18-79 from across the country. The sample of participants was balanced for both ethnicity and gender. 

For each of the 10 mock interview answers the participants heard, they were asked to evaluate the candidate's performance, knowledge, suitability, and hireability for a job. Participants were asked to rate the candidate on a 10-point scale - where 10 is the highest. They were asked to respond to questions such as:

1. “How would you rate the overall quality of the candidate's answer?”
2. “Does the candidate's answer show expert knowledge?”
3. “How likely is it that the candidate will succeed as a lawyer?”
4. “Is the candidate somebody that you personally would like to work with?”
5. “How would you rate the candidate overall?”

The participants also provided information on their age, social background, and education. 

When we analysed the results, we found a significant effect of the listener's age. Older listeners generally rated the two southern accents (MLE and EE) lower than all of the other accents. Younger participants, however, did not show this pattern. 

You can see this effect in the graph below. On the right are the older participants and on the left, the younger participants. The higher the line, the more positive the evaluation. As one can see, the ratings drop when you move from the younger respondents to their older peers. 

Is accent bias decreasing or is this just 'age-grading'?

This could mean one of two things. It could be that general attitudes to accents are changing, such that younger listeners will continue to exhibit the same accent preferences later on in life. On the other hand, it's possible that this could be evidence of age-grading. This is where young people might be more tolerant of accent diversity in their early years but become more critical as they get older.

A second finding of this study was that people's evaluations of accents in the responses to the interview questions depends on the type of question being answered. In questions that require a degree of technical or specialist knowledge, like those questions which asked specific details about law, all accents were rated more favourably. In more general questions, such as those which asked personal details or the work experience of the candidate, the accents were downrated much more.

Degree of expertise and accent rating

The effect of the 'expertise' required is shown in the graph above. The yellow line indicates 'expert' answers and the green line indicates 'non-expert' answers. As you should be able to see, all accents are rated much lower when the answer is a 'non-expert' answer than for an 'expert' answer. 

We also asked participants a series of questions aimed to test how prejudiced they were. We proposed that the more prejudiced people were, the lower their ratings of the different accents would be. In fact, this is exactly what we find. See the graph below. 

More prejudiced listeners were more likely to downrate all of the accents  

Those who reported they were more likely to be prejudiced towards different accents showed much lower ratings than those who were more likely to control their prejudice. The graph above shows ratings depending on MCPR (Motivation to Control a Prejudice Response). The blue line is those who reported that they are not prejudiced towards different accents, whereas the green line is those who report exhibiting more prejudice. 

What these results suggest is that there is a a systematic bias against certain accents in England (particularly Southern working-class varieties), whereas RP is evaluated much more positively and is perceived to be the most suitable for professional employment.

However, these results are reported for the general public. Would we see the same types of evaluations amongst those who are responsible for hiring candidates? In the next blog post, we explore this question. In the meantime, you can find our more about the project by visiting the project website. 

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

Accent Bias: Responses to Accent Labels

Continuing our series of posts related to the 'Accent Bias in Britain' project, in this blog post we discuss some findings from our research which investigated current attitudes to accents in Britain.

In the first part of our study, we replicated Coupland & Bishop's study (2007, summarised in an earlier blog post) to see whether the accent attitudes that people held 12 years ago still persist today. A similar study was conducted by Giles in 1970, giving us a further time point to compare our results.

We recruited a sample of over 800 participants aged between 18 and 79 via a market research firm. The group of participants was intended to be a representative sample of the UK population, so was balanced for gender and region (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) and included all major ethnicity groups.

Once participants had been recruited, they were asked to respond to 38 British accent 'labels', such as 'Estuary English', 'Received Pronunciation', 'Multicultural British English', and 'Birmingham English'. You can listen to some of these accents here. The participants were asked to rate each accent label on a scale of 1-7 - where 1 is the lowest and 7 is the highest - for the prestige and pleasantness of the accent.

After they had completed the survey, we collected social information about the participant, including their gender, ethnicity, age, region of origin, highest level of education, occupation, English accent, languages spoken. We also asked them to complete a short questionnaire about their exposure to different UK accents, the diversity of their own social networks, their beliefs about bias in Britain, and respond to a series of questions designed to measure how much they were concerned about being perceived as prejudiced.

As the image above shows, when compared with Giles' results in 1969, Coupland and Bishop's results in 2004, our findings (2019) demonstrate that whilst there are some minor differences, overall, attitudes to accents in the UK remain fairly stable. Standard accents, such as Received Pronunciation (RP) remain very highly rated, whereas ethnic and urban accents, such as Birmingham English, are rated much less favourably. These findings appear to be stable across the three time points.

Want to replicate this study? 

We've developed a series of Language Investigations and Teaching Units that helps students and teachers develop a research project of their own! Head over to Teach Real English! to access these resources.  

However, all is not lost it seems. Although we see similar patterns across the three studies, we do see a gradual improvement in the ratings of the accents that are rated the lowest (Afro-Caribbean, Liverpool, Indian, Birmingham). In fact, our 2019 study reports quite the improvement in overall ratings of these accents. It's therefore possible that people view these accents much more positively than they did 50 years ago.

However, this study examines only responses to 'accent labels'. What would we find if we played actual audio recordings of these accents to participants? Would we see the same results? In the next blog post, we introduce the findings from the second part of our study. In the meantime, you can find our more about the project by visiting the project website. 

This summary was written by Christian Ilbury

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Why passives should not be shunned

hmm…. can a passive be said to be sneaky?

Scanning the pages of endless style guides, Geoffrey Pullum was startled at the amount of ruthless criticism devoted to the passive voice. Authors, journalists and writing tutors continuously discourage the use of the passive in writing, describing it as evasive, and somehow linking it to a lack of responsibility. But not only do these critics lack a coherent definition of the passive, they also seem to do little to justify their position.  So the researcher set out to thoroughly describe the passive from a syntactic perspective. He cuts the language mavens' arguments to ribbons.

Passives come in all sorts, from the canonical The president’s authority has been much diminished to Marie got photographed by a journalist. Contrary to popular belief, passives may specify the agent very clearly, usually by means of a ­by-phrase, as in It was thrown at them by hooligans – where we know exactly who is responsible for the action. Now and then passives occur without be or a past participle, for instance, That said, however, Korea is Korea, not the Philippines. 

Pullum identified four kinds of criticisms in relation to passives. They are alleged to be

·      sneaky or evasive

·      avoided by good writers

·      dull and static

·      weak

Item number one refers to the vagueness of responsibility. As Sherry Roberts  put it:

A sentence written in passive voice is the shifty desperado who tries to win the gunfight by shooting the sheriff in the back, stealing his horse, and sneaking out of town.[1]

There are two ways of dealing with this criticism. First, in some cases the agent cannot or need not be specified at all. It can be irrelevant or unknowable, as the two sentences below demonstrate:

When the patient was first diagnosed with cancer her symptoms were minor.

Perhaps the mysterious mound was constructed as a memorial.

Second, a so-called long passive (with a ­by-phrase) can be an effective device to emphasize agency, as it gives details of the agent.

Another supposed fault of the passive is that they are omitted by good authors. In his essay Politics and the English language George Orwell, a celebrated writer, warned: ‘Never use the passive where you can use the active’[2]. Yet in the very piece of writing containing this advice, 20 % of the transitive verbs are passives! An average writer passivises only about 13% of verbs, which means that, in fact, Mr. Orwell resorted to this construction rather frequently.

As regards the two other criticisms, weakness and dullness, these are much more dependent on the content of the text, rather than on a specific syntactic construction.

To sum up, the holy war against the passive voice, launched by style guide authors and writing tutors since the early 20^th century, has little to do with the passive as such. When used appropriately, it can be as dynamic, powerful and accurate as any other form of language. The key question is to use it wisely and appropriately.

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[1] http://www.editorialservice.com/writing-and-editing/11ways.html#7, in Section 7, ‘Be Active’

[2] Orwell, G., 1946. Politics and the English language. Horizon, 252–264

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Geoffrey K. Pullum (2014) Fear and loathing of the English passive. Language and Communication 37: 60-74.

doi. http://dx/doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom2013.08.009 

This summary was written by Maryna Myntsykovska