Matched guise effects can be robust to speech style

Abstract

When investigating how listeners evaluate the social meaning of variability in speech, researchers using the Matched Guise Technique (MGT) must decide whether to use read speech or conversational speech stimuli. An MGT experiment comparing social evaluation of /ɪŋ/ ∼ /ɪn/ variation in read and conversational speech styles found no evidence that the social evaluation of this variation differed across frame utterance styles. This suggests that use of read speech stimuli can be an appropriate methodological choice in MGT research.