Pronounced Rivalries: Attitudes and Speech Production

Speakers vary their speech depending on an addressee (Giles 1973; Bell 1984, 2001), and their attitudes toward the addressee play some role in the direction and degree of the shift (Giles, Coupland, and Coupland 1991). However, a number of questions remain: how do attitudes affect phonetic shifts? And are different sounds affected differently? This paper reports results from a production experiment testing the degree to which speakers from New Zealand shift their speech when exposed to 'good' and 'bad' facts about Australia. The results suggest that exposure to the different facts shifted the participants' vowel realisations. However, sports fans behaved differently across the conditions than non-sports fans, a result which is interpreted as reflecting different levels of engagement in the sporting rivalry between Australia and New Zealand. The results are discussed in terms of how sounds and social information are stored in the mind and later accessed during speech production.