Giles matched-guise technique
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.
The experimental
procedure revolves around a variety of different people who acted as judges
listening to different accents and regional dialects and evaluating their
personal qualities solely based on their voices. The topic they talked about
was capital punishment and the arguments were completely identical and the
judges replied with how influential the different accents made their arguments and
ranked each of them.
Oddly during the
experiment the different accents were done by one person and the judges did not
know that it was only one but a range of different people from various areas.
The test was done without seeing the person which meant the only difference was
the speech but the tone and pitch would sound the same. This meant there was
nothing affecting the results and the way of speaking would be exactly the same
and the accent was the only thing being focused on.
Findings
Those
who heard RP were most impressed, those who heard Birmingham were least impressed.
Other findings-those
who heard regional accents were more likely to have changed their minds after
the presentation.
Limitation
One
limitation was that the judges may find out that there was only one person
performing the various accents which could lead them to having different
accents and make the results less reliable.
The
information found also matches what people still think now. This is found in a
recent 2014 survey which showed the people of the UK thought the Brummie accent
was the least attractive and scored -53
on the survey which shows there is little difference in what Giles found to
what people still think today.
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