Linguistic research on media focuses primarily on production of linguistic features in radio, television, and film. Less research deals with perception of regional and social dialects in fictional media. This dissertation aims to fill that gap by examining the role fictional representations of dialect use on television might play in language attitudes. It will extend the study of social cognition and perception in linguistic media research by testing whether linguistic stereotypes primed by media representations are extended to a non-media speaker of a dialect and whether explicit knowledge that an actor is performing a dialect as a native or non-native speaker affects attitudes. The three main goals of the project are to (1) complement and augment research on language attitudes via media by empirically testing assumptions about media and language attitudes, (2) provide a baseline study of explicit and implicit attitudes in language, and (3) explore whether viewer knowledge that a dialect is being performed by a native versus non-native speaker of the dialect contributes to attitudes. I propose three experiments to address these research goals. Experiment 1 will test whether hearing an unintelligencharacter who speaks either a stigmatized or non- stigmatized American regional dialect in a scene from a fictional television show will shift explicit and implicit attitudes about the intelligence of an actual speaker of that dialect whom the participant interacts with in the form of a research assistant. Experiment 2 follows the same structure as Experiment 1, but adds viewer knowledge about a speaker in the media as a variable. The viewer will be told the less intelligent speaker in the media clip is played by an actor who is either a native speaker of the dialect or a non-native performing it. Experiment 3 will test if listeners can identify whether they are hearing a native or non-native speaker of an American regional dialect.