Gender and Language : A matched-guise study exploring linguistic stereotyping using voice morphing

• Main Author: Östling, Mattias
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Umeå universitet, Institutionen för språkstudier 2016
• Subjects: sexism; stereotyping; matched-guise; voice morphing; sociolinguistics; collaborative speech; competitive speech; Specific Languages; Studier av enskilda språk; General Language Studies and Linguistics; Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-122483

The matched-guise test, which was originally developed by Lambert et al. (1960), has been useful in determining covert attitudes towards accents, dialects, or languages. In this paper, the author presents a fresh take on matched-guise tests in sociolinguistics utilizing modern technology to digitally manipulate a female voice into a male voice. This makes it possible to create recordings in which the tone, intonation, stress, and personality traits are the same, yet the apparent guise is different, thus allowing us to ascertain attitudes towards the sexes as well. Using this method on 169  respondents of mixed sex, the author has shown that there are statistical differences between how the male and female guises are interpreted. When all collaborative and competitive aspects are combined, the female guise is considered more collaborative, while the male is considered more competitive. Contradictory to old stereotypes it would also seem as though men are considered less knowledgeable than women. Less sexist people also rate the male and the female guise more unevenly than more sexist people do. A less sexist person favours the female guise on collaborative variables, while a more sexist person favours neither guise.