Dialect Test
The Dialect Test was created by A.J. Ellis in February 1879, and was used in the fieldwork for his work "On Early English Pronunciation". It stands as one of the earliest methods of identifying vowel sounds and features of speech. The aim was to capture the main vowel sounds of an individual dialect by listening to the reading of a short passage. All the categories of West Saxon words and vowels were included in the test so that comparisons could be made with the historic West Saxon speech as well as with various other dialects.
Speech shadowing
The speech shadowing technique is used in dichotic listening tests. The first one to apply this technique was E. Colin Cherry in 1953. During dichotic listening tests, subjects are presented with two different messages, one in their right ear and one in their left. The participants are often asked to focus on only one of the different messages and this is where the speech shadowing technique is used. Participants are instructed to shadow the attended message by repeating it out loud with a delay of a few seconds between hearing a word and repeating the word. The speech shadowing technique is significant for these experiments because it ensures that the subjects are attending to the desired message. Various other stimuli are then presented to the other ear, and subjects are afterwards queried on what they can recall from the other message.