Accent and television journalism: evidence for the practice of speech language pathologists and audiologists

Purpose: To analyze the preferences and attitudes of listeners in relation to regional (RA) and softened accents (SA) in television journalism. Methods: Three television news presenters recorded carrier phrases and a standard text using RA and SA. The recordings were presented to 105 judges who listened to the word pairs and answered whether they perceived differences between the RA and SA, and the type of pronunciation that they preferred in the speech of television news presenters. Afterwards, they listened to the sentences and judged seven attributes in the contexts of RA and SA using a semantic differential scale. Results: The listeners perceived the difference between the regional and softened pronunciation (p<0.0001). They preferred the SA in the presenters' speech in all variants studied (p<0.0001). There was an association between linguistic variants and the judgment of attitudes (p=0.002). The listeners regarded the presence of SA in the presenters' speech as positive in all variants studied (p<0.0001). Conclusion: The listeners prefer and assign positive values to the SA in the speech of television journalists in all linguistic variants studied.