SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF ACCOMMODATING ONE’S STYLE OF SPEECH: A CROSS-NATIONAL INVESTIGATION

Recent psycholinguistic research makes it increasingly evident that a person's speech style is a socially significant cue that others use in making inferences about a speaker's ethnicity, social class, and personality. In fact, the reception one receives from others in social interaction appears to be influenced as much by his style of speech including variations in dialect, accent, and language — as by any other cue expressed through face-to-face contact. For example, in a recent investigation by Seligman, Tucker, and Lambert (1972) pupils' speech styles affected teachers' judgments of their intelligence as much or more than photographs of the pupils or actual samples of their school work. There is also some evidence now available that school marks assigned by teachers can be biased according to pupils' modes of speaking (Frender and Lambert, 1972). The present study looks into the social consequences that follow when a speaker accomodates or fails to accommodate his speech style with reference to his interlocutor. The study makes use of the "matched-guise" technique, a procedure that pairs different linguistic guises of the 'same speaker as a means of eliciting stereotyped impressions or biased views that listeners may have of particular social groups (Lambert, 1967; Giles, 1971). The procedure has proved instructive and useful in the study of social tensions in a bicultural setting such as Quebec (see Lambert, 1970), in crosscultural studies (Lambert, Anisfeld, and Yeni-Komshian, 1965), and in multi-ethnic societies such as Great Britain (Giles, 197la). The research conducted in Quebec has shown that English-