Attitude Research

The term “attitude” and the study of attitudes are both borrowings from social psychology.

Edwards wrote, “Because language is one of the traditionally important social markers, it is not surprising that the study of attitudes has a central position in the social psychology of language” (1999). People have reacted to and evaluated different accents, dialects and languages since the beginning of mankind’s verbal history. Historically, two theoretical approaches are discussed regarding the study of language attitudes. The first one is the behaviorist view, in which attitudes must be studied by observing the responses to certain languages in actual interactions. Conversely, the mentalist view says that attitudes are an internal, mental state, which can explain certain forms of behavior. The mentalist view has been the one most widely followed and employed in language attitude research as it is most conductive to surveys and interviews.

One of the first groundbreaking attitude studies was made by Lambert in 1960 presenting the “matched guise” technique, i.e. the same speaker presented as “native” in one or more varieties. Since then many dialectal and bilingual studies have followed in a similar strain.

While the “matched guise” technique is still often used, it is often removed due to lack of authenticity and poor feasibility on the part of the speaker.

Indeed language is such a powerful social force that listeners, even small children, perceive and interpret linguistic and paralinguistic variation in messages as indicators of both personal and social characteristics (Cargile & Giles, 1997). Magen (1998) cited research (Flege & Hammond, 1982; Flege, 1984) that showed that listeners could detect a foreign accent after exposure to a sample of speech as short as 30 ms. However, there is no research that states how long it takes for a listener to recognize or identify a foreign accent. In most language attitude studies listeners are asked to rank or evaluate speakers on qualities relating to prestige, power, or social attractiveness by asking questions like “how friendly is this person” or “how educated does this person sound”? The results of language-attitude studies are based on the premise that languages (or linguistic varieties) are objectively comparable and intrinsically and inherently equal and the differences in subjective evaluation of speech fragments are not caused by differences in aesthetics or logic but rather by the differences in the social position of the listeners and the imposed norms their culture has bred within them. Piske, et al, (2001) stated in their review that it appears the accuracy of a non-native speakers pronunciation is dependent on the L1. They also stated that studies have shown that read speech was judged to be more strongly foreign-accented than spontaneous speech samples. Furthermore, Markham wrote that “If listeners are told that all speakers are non-native, then it seems likely that listeners will tend towards hearing accent. If they are told that native speakers are present in the sample, then some listeners may err on the side of caution and be inclined to give all speakers slightly better scores” (1997).

There are some questions as to the reliability of participants. scoring but Magen (1998) cited sources that stated untrained listeners perform reliably when judging foreign accents although experienced listeners can sometimes be more so. There are additional factors that may affect a listener’s response. Non-linguistic factors such as context, topic, and relevance of the text may alter a listener’s scoring. Degree of emotionality and humor may also factor in. Previous studies have also considered rate of speaking and musical ability among other things as possible and probable factors affecting attribute scoring.

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