Attention to speech

The first of the four Approaches I will discuss is Attention to Speech. Taglimonte (2006: p.8) suggests that it is “the style from which every other style must be calibrated”. William Labov devised a sociolinguistic interview designed to produce a range of types of speech. His main interest was to obtain and identify data that represented people’s casual speech, rather than speech that was altered due to the presence of an observer. Most of the interview was conversational and produced two types of speech, these were identified as careful speech “the interviewee was somewhat guarded” Schilling- Eates (2004: p.384) and casual speech “the interviewee spoke in a more natural way” Schilling- Eates (2004: p.384). The interview contained several tasks to elicit speech that was very self-conscious, as well as to produce signs of phonological variants relevant to the study, a reading passage, a word-list and a list of minimal pairs. Labov’s interview demonstrated that style changes are triggered primarily by the amount of attention people pay to their speech while they converse. However Attention to speech approach has been criticized, for example Bell (1984) notes that it is difficult to quantify attention to speech, and “experiments designed to investigate the effects of differing degrees of attention to speech on variation in usage levels vs. vernacular variants have resulted in mixed results” Bell (1984 p: 58). In addition Coupland (2003: p.34) also suggest that it is not possible to define naturalness in speaking. Audience Design initially proposed by Allan Bell who studied two radio broadcasts made in the 1970s from the same broadcasting studio, involving the same individual newsreader. Clark (2013: p.130) suggests that “Bell used Labovian methods based upon a linguistic variable to study”, and showed that they systematically varied some aspects of their speech across the two different broadcasting contexts. Audience Design seems to overcome some of the