Lucy Jackson

Accent biases have been found to impact real-life events such as job prospects and increased chances of being accused of a crime. Beyond academia, modern society has made progress towards tackling discrimination against race, gender, and other social factors, yet accent bias remains relatively unaddressed.

The broadcast media are assumed to influence people’s attitudes to regional accents and the social evaluations made towards the speaker, but this has never been empirically tested. Overall, I am interested in language variation and its relation to social meaning and practice. I’m researching the working-class Glaswegian vernacular and what social information it carries. I will be looking at the media portrayal of this stigmatised dialect and Glaswegian identity, and whether such representations can influence our implicit and explicit attitudes towards the dialect and speakers from this community. This project will have an interdisciplinary approach and will employ eye-tracking techniques to measure implicit cognition and biases towards the stigmatised dialect.