Effects of phonological speech foreignness upon three dimensions of attitude of selected American listeners

Abstract

The development and evaluation of the multi‐dimensional Speech Dialect Attitudinal Scale is described. Use of this semantic differential by townspeople and university students to rate audiotape recordings of European and American speakers’ spontaneous English monologues provided data of high reliability and consistent factor structure. Results indicated that native‐born speakers were rated significantly higher than their foreign‐born counterparts on three attitudinal dimensions.