The impact of British accents on perceptions of eyewitness statements

Lara A. Frumkin

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Linguistic Variation and Morphology Legal processes and jurisprudence Jury Decision Making Processes

Abstract

The current study looked at the impact of British regional accents on evaluations of eyewitness testimony in criminal trials. Ninety participants were randomly presented with one of three video recordings of eyewitness testimony manipulated to be representative of Received Pronunciation (RP), Multicultural London English (MLE) or Birmingham accents. The impact of the accent was measured through eyewitness (a) accuracy, (b) credibility, (c) deception, (d) prestige, and (e) trial outcome (defendant guilt and sentence). RP was rated more favourably than MLE on accuracy, credibility and prestige. Accuracy and prestige were significant with RP rated more highly than a Birmingham accent. RP appears to be viewed more favourably than the MLE and Birmingham accents although the witness's accents did not affect ratings of defendant guilt. Taken together, these findings show a preference for eyewitnesses to have RP speech over some regional accents.

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References

1960Evaluational reactions to spoken languages.1967A Social Psychology of Bilingualism 1999Effects of Perceptual Fluency on Judgments of Truth 2011Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English 2010Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility 1970EVALUATIVE REACTIONS TO ACCENTS 2009Accent Trumps Race in Guiding Children's Social Preferences 1994Accent, standard language ideology, and discriminatory pretext in the courts

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