Evaluational reactions to spoken French and English in Montreal: Does mother tongue really matter?

Abstract

AbstractMontreal became famous in socio-psychological and sociohnguistic circles half a century ago, when a group of researchers—Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, and Fil-lenbaum — invented a new methodology to measure speech evaluations indirectly. They came up with an innovative technique, called matched guise, which allows researchers to access subjects’ reactions without asking for their opinions directly or doing extensive field work. In 2004, another matched guise study of the evaluational reactions of Montrealers added new aspects to the original methodological design in order to test some of its limits. The fundamental methodological difference was to include members of different language groups in a representative sample of the population of Montreal so that multivariate analysis could determine the extent to which belonging to a specific linguistic group could actually account for reactions to spoken language. This analysis reveals that some earlier interpretations should be realigned.