Academic outputs

    Reports and presentations on our research with associated documents, slideshows and posters.

    Sutton Trust report

    In November 2022, we published Speaking Up: Accents and Social Mobility for the Sutton Trust. The report documents the experiences of bias and career-related anxiety among speakers of different accents at different life stages. You can access the report in .pdf format by clicking here.

    Full project report

    In 2020, we published the full ‘Accent Bias in Britain’ project report. The report details the rationale for our study, our methodology, and the main findings of our analyses. You can access the report in .pdf format by clicking here.

    Articles

    Dynamic sociolinguistic processing: Real-time change in judgments of speaker competence (2022). Language. Article. 

    Accent Bias and Perceptions of Professional Competence in England. (2021). Journal of English Linguistics 49(4): 355-388. Article.  

    50 years of British accent bias: Stability and lifespan change in attitudes to accents. (2021). English World-Wide 43(2). Article.

    Inter-speaker variation and the evaluation of British English accents in employment contexts. (2019). In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, eds S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, and P. Warren (Melbourne, VIC), 1615–1619. Article.

    Methods for the study of accent bias and access to elite professions. (2019). Journal of Language and Discrimination, 3(2): 150–172. Article.

    Further articles are forthcoming and in production. Details will be updated as these become available.

    Presentations and slides

    The role of subjective perceptions of UK regional and social accents in access to elite professions. Paper presented at Urban Futures: Workshop on Language-Based Discrimination, University of Sheffield, October 2018. 

    Accent bias and perceptions of professional competence in the UK. Paper presented at the International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE) 12, Fryske Academy, Leeuwarden. June 2019. Slides

    Inter-speaker variation and the evaluation of British English accents in employment contexts. Paper presented at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Melbourne, August 2019. Slides Article 

    The effect of accent on judgments of professional competence. Poster presented at United Kingdom Language Variation and Change (UKLVC) 10, Queen Mary University of London. September 2019. Poster 

    Real-time evaluations of accent and professional competence. Paper presented at Experimental Approaches to Perception and Production (ExAPP), University of Münster, September 2019. Slides 

    Accent Bias and Judgments of Professional Competence: A Comparison of Laypeople and Trained Recruiters. Poster presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 48, University of Oregon, October 2019. Poster 

    Attitudes to accents in Britain: Ideologies, phonetic detail and the reproduction of accent bias. Paper presented at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting, New Orleans, January 2020. Slides 

    Nested language ideologies: Does context affect accent bias? Paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 23, University of Hong Kong, June 2021. Slides