| |
Dialect Rating System
One of the fastest ways to classify a person’s type and density of a particular dialect is to use a listener judgment task. As illustrated in Oetting and McDonald (2002), our blind listener judgment task is constructed in the following way.
- We randomly select a 1 to 3-minute excerpt from an audio taped sample of a person speaking (we typically use a 1-minute excerpt from conversational speech).
- We ask three graduate students who are familiar with the dialect of interest to independently listen to the excerpt. To facilitate their ratings, we ask them to consider four types of linguistic behaviors (vocabulary, grammar, phonology, and stress/intonation) and we give them a rating sheet with a 7-point Likert scale. Below is an example of a scale created for Cajun English.
- For dialect type, we may classify someone as a Cajun English speaker if two or more listeners rate the excerpt with a score of 2 or higher.
- For dialect density, we average the three listener ratings together.
1 = no use of Cajun English
3 = little use of Cajun English (present in less than 25% of utterances)
5 = occasional use of Cajun English (present in 25% to 40% of utterances)
7 = heavy use of Cajun English (present in 40% or more of utterances)
_1_________2__________3_________4__________5___________6______7_
No Use Heavy Use |
If you are interested in using this type of rating scale, a copy of a full scale is listed in the appendix of Oetting & McDonald (2002).
back |
 |
