Matched-guise test

The matched guise test is a sociolinguistic experimental technique used to determine the true feelings of an individual or community towards a specific language, dialect, or accent. In this technique, human subjects listen to recordings of speakers of two or more language varieties and make judgments about various traits of those speakers, such as body height, good looks, leadership, sense of humor, intelligence, religiousness, self confidence, dependability, kindness, ambition, sociability, character, and likability (Stefanowitsch 2005). The subjects believe they are hearing different speakers, not realizing that they are actually listening to a single speaker, a bilingual or polyglot, who is secretly performing two or more voices or linguistic personas, known as "guises". Therefore, the subjects end up eliciting their attitudes on different speech varieties as being used (without the subjects' knowledge) by a single speaker. This experiment was first introduced by Wallace Lambert and his colleagues at McGill University in 1960s to determine attitudes held by bilingual French Canadians towards English and French (Davies & Elder 2004:189, Agheyisi & Fishman, 1970). Since the initial aim of these studies range from the influence of linguistic attitudes on educational and political systems to their influence on workplace environments, Lambert's technique has proven successful in identifying and eliciting certain stereotypes toward particular social groups. The matched guise technique has been widely used in bicultural settings such as in Quebec, as well as in cross cultural studies and multi ethnic societies, and it has been employed not only as an instrument in comparing attitudes toward languages, but also toward variations in dialects and accents. And depending on particular listener, a speaker's accent, speech patterns, vocabulary, intonation, etc., can all serve as markers for evaluating speaker's appearance, personality, social status, and character. Among other things, listeners also possess language attitudes, which they use to evaluate the speakers whom they are hearing.

The matched guise technique was developed and pioneered by Lambert et al. (1960) to evaluate the reactions of Montreal residents towards both French speakers and English speakers. Lambert continued to implement the matched guise technique to further studies, including an investigated on how people evaluated English speakers with and without a Jewish accent (Anisfeld 1962), moving beyond the technique's original purpose of evaluating attitudes to different languages. The same technique has been applied to English speakers in the United Kingdom. In an investigation into assessing people's varying reactions to London and Yorkshire accents (Strongman and Woosley 1967), the judges of the various guises were all students and were split equally into a “southern” and a “northern” group. The results, however, did not show much variation in the judges' attitudes towards the accents. The matched guise test has since been used on many other countries for a range of other languages and dialects.

It is typical in matched guise tests for one of the recordings to be of a speaker using his or her 'natural' dialect, and another of the same speaker 'performing' another dialect. To assume that the two are commensurable is methodologically naive. In addition, in certain scenarios it may be impossible for the passages to be spoken by the individual due to the likelihood that the listener recognizes speakers as one and the same. To avoid this many studies have used different speakers to read the passage. This is problematic as it is difficult to control for differences between the speakers, such as speed or intonation (Tsalikis et al. 1991). Another method is to split up the listeners into two groups and have each group listen to only a single guise, in which case it becomes necessary to include identical filler material to see if the two groups rate identical passages similarly (Stefanowitsch 2005).

Moreover, this technique presupposes that the linguistic varieties evaluated have only one functional style (Agheyisi & Fishman, 1970). Thus, it is unable to explain the social meaning of speakers' multistylistic capacity in different contexts or degrees of knowledge of the linguistic varieties evaluated. However, efforts have been made to improve the matched guise test to cater for this (Howard & Bourhis 1976).