Purpose
to analyze the preferences of listeners as the regional accent and accent softened in the context of formal and informal communication.
Methods
three TV news presenter recorded vehicle-phrases in situations of regional and soft accent. The recordings were presented to 105 judges, who heard pairs of words and asked which of the two pronunciations preferred to talk about television news presenters (formal context), for native speakers of the local community (informal context) and to the speech itself (context informal).
Results
the presence of listeners preferred the understated accent in a formal context (presentation of television news in all language variants studied (p <0.0001) and, on the other hand, preferred the presence of regional accents (p <0.0001) in informal context. however, speaks for itself, within the informal context, there was a general preference for regional accent or understated, statistical significance only for palatalization of / S / in medial coda (p <0.0001) and not palatalization of dental (p <0.0001), both characteristics of regional accents, and the non-occurrence of monophthongization (p <0.0001) and matching vowel (p <0.0001), characterized as understated accent.
Conclusion
listeners prefer to speaks with an accent softened in a formal communication but prefer the regional accent within an informal context, especially in less educated speakers.
Speech; Language and Hearing Sciences; Speech; Speech Perception; Television
