This study examined the degree to which readers' affective responses to levels of language usage reflect their attitudes toward language usage. The subjects, 51 college juniors and seniors, read nine simulated newspaper interviews and completed five semantic differential scales that indicated their impressions of the interviewee's personality and educational background, based on the language style (formal-standard, colloquial, substandard) of direct quotations from the interviewee's remarks. After subjects completed an English language attitude inventory that established either conservative or liberal language attitudes, differences in the semantic differential scales were analyzed. Results indicate that the "intelligent-unintelligent" and "cultured-uncultured" scales provided significantly greater distinctions between language style, and that the "language liberals" had the larger mean-differences on these scales. The study concludes that language liberals are more sensitive to language differences, probably because of their own educational background and language training. (RL)