Final Integrative Reflection

            Speech affects audience perception. In Sociolinguistics, I learned that speakers will often cater their speech toward that of their audience in order to be accepted. This implies that it is, in some way, beneficial to alter one’s speech patterns in various environments. People may even code-switch to an entirely different dialect of the language altogether. When people change their speech patterns, they move towards the prestige variant for that particular context. The prestige variant is the speech pattern or dialect that people consider to be “better” in a given context. Regarding dialects, this is typically Standard American English (SAE) because it is associated with higher education, higher socioeconomic status, and professionalism. Other dialects, such as regional dialects and racially-stigmatized dialects, have more negative associations unless within ingroup environments (e.g. Southern speech in the South). I am interested in how the concept of dialect perception could affect advertising. Is it beneficial to alter speech in order to sell to a specific audience? If so, this would imply that different dialects in advertising have different effects on people’s perceptions of products.

I experienced this myself a few years ago before I learned this information when I worked at a Holiday Inn in Guin, Alabama. I worked at the front desk and was required to get a certain number of guests to sign up for our rewards program each month. I had to advertise the program to every guest we had. Since I grew up in Baton Rouge in a suburban environment, I speak Standard American English for the most part with very few Southern speech characteristics. The hotel was located in rural northwest Alabama. It was, however, located directly off of the interstate connecting Memphis with Birmingham. Naturally, many businessmen from the urban cities stayed in the hotel. Looking back, I realize that I had great success getting urbanites to join the rewards program. However, when people from the area came to the hotel, I was almost never successful. These people spoke Southern American English with features specific to the area: different grammatical structures, pronunciation, etc. Many times, I had to ask them to repeat themselves and vice versa because we had some trouble understanding one another. Connecting this information with what I learned in Sociolinguistics, it could be that my speech somehow deterred them from joining the rewards program.

Building upon what I learned in Sociolinguistics (my English minor), I turn from a focus on the individual who is speaking and instead focus now on the audience’s perception (my Psychology minor). I learned about auditory perception in Sensation and Perception, a Psychology course. I learned that humans perceive sounds that they have been conditioned to hear. Speech perception is developed. In a study conducted by Werker et al. (1981), both Hindi infants and English infants could distinguish between Hindi speech sounds that do not exist in English (352). English-speaking adults could not accurately identify the differences and instead perceived the two sounds as the same sound (354). I learned in this class that by ten to twelve months old, babies can only distinguish between sounds in their native languages, like adults. This implies that the speech we hear spoken around us in our developmental years is the speech that we perceive with accuracy. The more familiar we become with our native languages through our developmental years, the more we lose our ability to perceive sounds in foreign languages. Based on this, it can be inferred that we also have difficulty distinguishing speech sounds of other accents/dialects than the one we learn to speak in our developmental years. Referring back to my Holiday Inn experience, I had difficulty understanding the speech of the native rural speakers because their speech sounds were unfamiliar to me, and I was not developmentally conditioned to distinguish between their speech sounds.

Connecting this Psychology information to Sociolinguistics, the dialect a person hears being spoken while growing up is the dialect that the person is most comfortable interpreting. It is not usually difficult to communicate with someone speaking the same dialect, but it is difficult in dialects that do not match up because we cannot distinguish between similar speech sounds of another dialect. For example, Southern English Speakers do not perceive a difference between two vowel sounds that are different in the north but the same in their dialect.

Now incorporating both disciplines into the advertising dilemma, it is the amount of comfortability with a dialect that affects perception of a dialect. Since a person cannot distinguish between sounds of an unfamiliar dialect, the dialect is uncomfortable for the person and difficult to understand. This could be a problem in advertising because advertisers want their audience to be drawn in by their product. If the dialect spoken in the advertisement is one that the audience is not comfortable with, it follows that the advertisement will not be persuasive. The same advertisement might be persuasive, however, to a person who speaks the same dialect as the person in the advertisement.

Lalwani et al. (2005) conducted a study on consumer responses to spokespeople with different accents advertising products. One spokesperson spoke in the Standard British English accent, and the other spokesperson spoke in the local Singaporean English accent. The study found that consumers responded more favorably to the advertisement given by the spokesperson with the Standard British English accent, and purchase intention rankings were higher for all products in this condition (159). Connecting this study to my dilemma, the standard dialect of any language is usually the prestige variant, so the consumers in the study must have attached prestige to the Standard British English accent and responded favorably to the advertisement because of that prestige. Therefore, advertisements that are catered to the prestige variant are more likely to be successful. Additionally, the study found that the consumers paid more attention to the advertisement given by the spokesperson with the local Singaporean English accent (156). This implies that the speakers were not as familiar with this accent, requiring them to pay extra attention. It is interesting that paying extra attention did not cause them to respond favorably to the products. The extra attention had the reverse effect, deterring them from the products. This refers back to the issue discussed previously of comfortability with a dialect. The consumers were not comfortable with the accent differing from their own, so the advertisement was unsuccessful. Therefore, advertisements that cater accents to the accent of the audience are more likely to be successful.

In conclusion and to solve the dilemma, it would be beneficial to cater advertisements to specific audiences regarding dialects. Prestige variants and comfortability must both be taken into account when creating successful advertisements. If the prestige variant is the standard dialect, then the standard dialect should be spoken in the advertisement. Additionally, whatever accent the intended audience speaks in should be the accent spoken in the advertisement. If advertisers take these concepts from Sociolinguistics and Psychology into account, then their advertisements should be more successful.