Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1135

Part of Session 171: Experimental methods in the study of social meaning (Other abstracts in this session)

The matched (dis)guise technique and its alternative, the ‘open guise’

Authors: Soukup, Barbara
Submitted by: Soukup, Barbara (University of Vienna, Austria)

Ever since Lambert et al.’s (1960) landmark study that introduced the ‘matched guise technique’ for eliciting speaker evaluations, a ‘disguising’ ploy has been tacitly accepted as part and parcel of the technique’s application, by which informants are to be kept unaware that they are hearing at least one speaker multiple times using different languages or language varieties. Presumably, one motivation for this ploy is the assumption that listeners would not produce differentiated ratings if they knew that speakers were actually the same across ‘guises’.

The present paper undertakes to discuss and question this hitherto uncontested policy of concealment and its status as an intrinsic component of the matched guise technique. Data from an ‘open guise’ speaker evaluation experiment are presented, in which twenty-nine Austrian informants were asked to listen to and rate two speakers on five-point bipolar semantic differential scales (Osgood et al. 1957). Informants were explicitly told that they would hear each speaker twice, in two alternative ways of talking. The varieties tested were standard Austrian German and Middle Bavarian-Austrian dialect; two female bi-dialectal speakers were recorded in each ‘guise’, presenting the same text.

Results show that being aware that a speaker is identical across guises does not pose a problem to informants at all in such a speaker evaluation task. For both speakers, significantly differentiated ratings were produced between guises, showing that dialect use is i.a. associated with significantly less intelligence, education, and refinement, but more friendliness and likeability than standard use. A subsequent comparison of the open guise results with those of a broad-scale verbal guise study using the same design, two of the same speech recordings, and a much larger informant sample of n=242 shows the elicited stereotypes to be largely robust.

It is suggested that the affordances of the open guise technique vis-à-vis the traditional matched (dis)guise are mainly two-fold:

(1) It puts a significantly lesser burden on informants and researchers, as distractor voices between samples can be culled from the protocol

(2) It provides a more plausible access to listeners’ social evaluation of speakers specifically in the context of research that investigates multi-lectal speakers’ strategic style-shifting/ code-switching for the purposes of differentiated identity projections (‘Speaker Design’ – Schilling-Estes 2002). Here, like in an open guise experiment, speakers remain openly the same while meaning is created via listeners’ assessment of their alternating language use. Findings from open guise studies can therefore directly inform studies of Speaker Design.

Depending on the research purpose, the open guise thus constitutes an important addendum to our battery of techniques in the empirical study of the social meaning of language variation.

References:

Lambert, W.E., Hodgson, R., Gardner, R.C., & Fillenbaum, S. (1960). Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60(1), 44-51.

Osgood, C.E., Suci, G.J., & Tannenbaum, P.H. (1957). The Measurement of Meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Schilling-Estes, N. (2002). Investigating Stylistic Variation. In J.K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, & N. Schilling-Estes (Eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (375-401). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

The matched (dis)guise technique and its alternative, the ‘open guise’