SINCE AS EARLY AS 1959, SOCIOLINGUISTS have tended to regard as almost a truism notion that speakers of a perceived prestige dialect such as Received Pronunciation in Great Britain are judged by nonprestige dialect speakers to be on one hand educated, intelligent, competent, industrious, and of a higher class socioeconomically yet on other hand less trustworthy and kind, as well as less socially attractive, sincere, and good-humored. These same subjects rendered exactly opposite judgments regarding nonstandard speakers like themselves-they were lower on socioeconomic scale, but higher on personality trait scale (see, among others, Tajfel 1959; Strongman and Woolsey 1967; Giles and Powesland 1975; Giles, Powesland, and Taylor 1977; and Sebastian and Ryan 1985). Moreover, Wardhaugh (1986, 330-31) cites this finding more or less as fact and basically extends this conclusion to black-white reactions to perceived standard speech as well. During this same period, some American dialectologists and sociolinguists were applying subjective-reaction testing to both regional and social dialects (see, among others, Labov 1966; Houck and Bowers 1969; Shuy and Fasold 1973; and Fraser 1987). Influenced in part by Coates (1986) study that noted differences in attitudes toward female versus male speech, we decided that it was time to engage in some related experimentation. Davis and Houck (1990, 127) tested the proposition that in Muncie, Indiana, different dialects of female speech affect perceived occupational status of female speakers, as well as regional and social identity of listeners. In brief, that study found that (1) Northern dialect speakers were ranked higher on an occupational scale than Southern dialect speakers; (2) women were not ranked lower on an occupational scale simply because they were women; (3) males and females responded same to speech of women; (4) listenersjudged their speech to be closer to those they ranked higher on occupational scale-that is, they judged their speech to be closer to Northern dialect speakers than to Southern dialect speakers; and (5) male and female speakers responded same way in ranking their own speech (130-32). The current study is concerned