Assessing Language Attitudes through a Matched-guise Experiment: The Case of Consonantal Deletion in Venezuelan Spanish

Abstract

This investigation contributes to the understanding of language attitudes toward consonantal deletion by examining its perception using a matched-guise experiment (Casesnoves and Sankoff 2004; Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, and Fillenbaum 1960) with fifteen listeners. Two experiments were designed for testing language attitudes, one toward intervocalic /d/ deletion and one toward syllable-final /ɾ/ deletion. The findings of this research support the hypothesis according to which retention of syllable-final /ɾ/ is perceived as a prestigious variant in Venezuelan Spanish. However, our findings do not show a strong attitudinal evaluation in favor of /d/ retention. These results provide a contribution to the study of language attitudes using a perceptual task, a practice that is not very commonly used to assess a linguistic variable. The findings show that production studies present useful evidence, but may not necessarily reflect a speaker’s evaluation of linguistic variants.

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