howard giles' matched-guise technique

Question 1

What is the matched-guise technique?

Answer 1

• determines the views/feelings of people towards a certain dialect/accent.
• the experiment revolves around a procedure of a variety of different students, acting as ‘judges’ listening to what they believe are different people’s accents /dialects (social and regional.)
• they evaluated their personal qualities solely based on their voice.

Question 2

What is the setup?

Answer 2

• researchers record a speaker saying the same thing while adopting different accents/dialects/speech styles(guises).
• these recordings can be manipulated to represent different social groups.

Question 3

What is the experiment?

Answer 3

• listeners are then showed these recordings and asked to evaluate the speaker’s personality traits/social qualities.
• these listeners are unaware it’s all the same person using different guises.

Question 4

What are the unveiling biases?

Answer 4

• by comparing how listeners evaluate the same speaker across different guises, researchers can reveal biases towards certain language varieties.
• for instance, listeners might rate a speaker with a prestigious accent (like RP in British English) as more intelligent than someone with a regional accent, even though the content of the speech is identical.

Question 5

What did Giles find?

Answer 5

the listeners concluded:
- RP was the most impressive/influential.
- Brummie accent was the least imposing/convincing.

Question 6

What is the social change of the matched-guise technique?

Answer 6

• it can be used to track changes in language attitudes over time.
• by comparing studies from different eras, researchers can see if biases towards certain accents are lessening.