Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series

Brandon Baird and Marcos Rohena-Madrazo, Department of Spanish & Portuguese and the Program in Linguistics will give a Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture titled, “He Sounds Like He Plays Soccer: Perceptions of Spanish-accented English.”

Previous research has shown that speakers of Spanish-accented English are frequently perceived as uneducated, lazy and more criminally inclined. In this presentation we explore the perceptions and stereotypes associated with the change in pronunciation of a single word of Spanish origin, e.g. taco, García, within a larger, non-accented English utterance. The results highlight the relative prejudices and racialized stereotypes that can lead towards linguistic profiling.