Gender-based Variation in the Perception of Northern Irish Accents in Performance

This paper builds on previous research that explores the relationship between gender and language perception (Bishop et al., 2005; Coupland & Bishop, 2007). It investigates the influence of speakers’ gender and listeners’ gender, two variables that have been usually examined separately, on how voices with Northern Irish English (NIrE) accents are rated on the traditional dimensions of prestige and pleasantness. The questionnaire responses of 138 informants from Northern Ireland reveal two main trends: (1) female respondents award more favourable ratings on prestige and pleasantness than males; and (2) female voices are evaluated more positively than male voices. These trends corroborate previous findings by Bishop et al. (2005) and Coupland and Bishop (2007). Finally, this study also shows that the first of these trends is reversed when informants evaluate the voices on the Mild-Broad and Intelligible-Unintelligible scales, where the ratings by male participants are more favourable that those given by women.