Abstract

Accent attitudinal evaluations have characteristically been carried out on children and young people in educational institutions or on adults in the 20-60 age range; this has been as much the case in New Zealand as elsewhere. As Bell and Holmes put it in a recent overview, “captive populations of school children, and to a lesser extent university students, have provided most of the samples” (1991:162). Hence there was a challenge to see if the findings which have seemed standard for other age groups apply equally to the elderly retired or whether there are some effects unique to them. It seemed likely to us on an intuitive basis that the elderly might not discriminate so much on the basis of gender as younger speakers. One of us was also interested to discover if worship attendance affected the findings in any significant way.

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