My clock radio went off this morning and I was greeted with a Lexus commercial. I noticed some SAT words like fastidious and stringent in the ad. And in pronouncing the word “process,” the speaker used a slight English accent on the ‘o’ so that it sounded like ‘pro.’ What is it about English accents and the perception of intelligence / class? I took a linguistics course in college and I remember reading an article in which the researcher played two sets of recorded speech to subjects: one set was in a standard American accent (or non-accent), the other was in an English accent. The words were the same. Most subjects said the British speaker sounded more intelligent, and even haughty. So I guess it’s not that surprising that Lexus, a classy Japanese automaker, wants to use English accents to make its cars sound classy. But it begs the question: are they gaining customers by using the accent, and what would happen if they used an accent widely associated with a lack of intelligence (Southern, for example) while a not-so-classy automaker used the English accent?