ABSTRACT
There is a flourishing research tradition in which the major objects of scrutiny are the kinds of evaluations that hearers make of speakers and the factors that affect these evaluations. Factors that have been examined include communication context, for example, formality of the situation in which a message is delivered (Street & Brady, 1982), and (crucially) speech style, for example, speaker accent and dialect (Cargile, 1997; Giles & Powesland, 1975; Hopper & de la Zerda, 1979). Evaluation is a basic, even primitive, psychological process, at its core entailing approach-avoidance tendencies and behaviors apparent in humans, canines, felines, reptiles, and unicellular organisms alike. In humans (at least), evaluation has a cognitive component in that thought, and more particularly verbalization, is often, even typically, inextricably bound to the process of acceptance or rejection of evaluationtriggering stimuli. Speech evaluation research has always exploited this cognitive component by using respondents who are aware of what they are doing, that is, evaluating speakers, and by asking respondents to make their judgments via verbal, often semantic-differential-type, scales (Bradac, 1990).
