The Evaluation of Gendered Identities in Situated Discourse

 

Laureen T. Lim and Ken N. Lacy

New York University

 

 

The seminal work of Lambert et al.’s (1960) Matched Guise Technique (MGT) has shown that listeners express consistent attitudes about speakers based on both the linguistic variety and the gender of speakers. However, one key shortcoming of this technique lies in the isolated context of the monologues generally utilized in studies. In this project, we extend the evaluation possibilities for the interpretation of ‘gendered’ speech by situating speakers in a more commonly occurring context: an interactive dialogue which better reflects natural speech. Additionally, by separating the effect of 'gendered' language content from voicing characteristics, we provide a more dynamic articulation of language attitudes.

 

While a typical MGT test has a single speaker adopt multiple guises or Voices (such as regional or ethnically identified accents), this study has the same speaker maintaining the same Voice but instead alternating between different dialogues (which we term Roles) in a discourse which contain varying 'gendered' language content. Hence, speakers consistently use the same Voice, but adopt different Role-based guises. As discourse analysis holds that the interpretation of meaning accesses a complex matrix of social elements, of which the identity of the speaker is one vital component, we maintain that a listener's evaluation of a speaker is tied not just to the Voice of a speech event, or the Role they assume in the speech event, but also to the situated context of the event itself.

 

Four different short dialogues involving female + male, male + female, male + male, and female + female Roles, showing stereotypically gendered linguistic features are identified by means of a pilot MGT study. These dialogues, controlled for length and excluding explicit gender references, reflect gendered linguistic features found in previous research (overview in Mulac et al. 2001). The four dialogues are crafted into recordings wherein each dialogue is spoken by every possible combination of Voice and Role, using speakers with identifiably gender-normative voices (with respect to pitch and linguistic style). As a result, in many of the dialogues the proto-typical genders of the Voices and Roles do not correspond. Using a between-subjects design, a varied subset of recordings is played to four groups of twenty respondents with eighty respondents in all. The listeners are asked to evaluate each set of guises with the responses normalized and analyzed.

 

Our results indicate that identical discourses may be evaluated by listeners in demonstrably different ways based on the particular configuration of Voice and Role. It appears that the judges evaluating these guises have a clear framework for constructing both context and social meaning where the evaluation of speakers depends not only on the correspondence of a gendered Voice with a gendered Role, it may also be influenced by the Voice-Role correspondence of the other speaker in the dialogue.

 

 

References

 

Lambert, W. E., R.C. Hodgson, R.C. Gardner and S. Fillenbaum. 1960. Evaluational Reactions to Spoken Language. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60: 44-51.

Mulac, Anthony, James J. Bradac and Pamela Gibbons. 2001. Empirical Support for the Gender-as-Culture Hypothesis: An Intercultural Analysis of Male/Female Language Differences. Human Communication Research, Vol. 27, No. 1: 121-52.

 

 

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