Origins
The matched-guise technique was developed and pioneered by Lambert et al. (1965) to evaluate the reactions of Montreal residents towards both French-speakers and English-speakers. Interestingly, the results of this initial investigation showed that as expected the Canadian English-speakers evaluated the Canadian French guises less favourably, but the Canadian French-speakers also attributed the Canadian English guises with less positive characteristics, which was not surprising.
Lambert continued to implement the matched-guise technique for further investigations. Some did not involve different languages, but different accents, such as in finding out how people evaluated English speakers with and without a Jewish accent (Anisfeld 1962).
The same technique has been applied to English-speakers in the United Kingdom. In an investigation into assessing people’s varying reactions to London and Yorkshire accents (Strongman and Woosley 1967), the judges of the various guises were all students and were split equally into a “southern” and a “northern” group. The results, however, did not show much variation in the judges’ attitudes towards the accents.
The technique was later used to investigate the perception of Scottish and English accents in the United Kingdom (Cheyne 1970) and of Welsh and Somerset accents with regard to received pronunciation (Giles 1971).
The matched-guise test has since been used on many other countries for a range of other languages and dialects.
Read more about this topic: Matched-guise Test
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