Can social psychological attitude measures be used to study language attitudes? - A case study exploring the Personalized Implicit Association Test

In the field of social psychology, a wide range of implicit attitude measures have recently been developed. These measures have hardly been used in linguistic attitude research so far. This paper presents a case study exploring the potential of one of these social psychological measures, the Personalized Implicit Association Test, in order to find out whether it can be useful for the study of language attitudes. In the case study, the Personalized Implicit Association Test is applied to measure attitudes towards regional varieties of Dutch in Belgium and Standard Belgian Dutch

New approaches to measuring the social meaning of language variation (invited talk)

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Experimental approaches to the study of the social meaning of language variation (invited keynote lecture)

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New approaches to measuring the social meaning of language variation

This talk reports on a research project that studies the perception of language variation in Belgian Dutch. The purpose of the project is twofold. First and foremost, this research has a methodological focus. Since the introduction of the matched guise technique (Lambert et al. 1960), quantitative language attitude research has hardly seen any methodological innovation. This contrasts sharply with the explosion of new attitude measures in social psychology, a field of research that is engaged in the study of attitudes – just like sociolinguistics. That is why this research project investigates which social psychological methods are suited and which adaptations they require to function as a tool for research into the social meaning of language variation. In addition to this methodological focus, the project has a descriptive component. It aims to give an impetus to the exploration of the language attitudes landscape in Flanders which has received relatively little scientific attention (Geeraerts & Van de Velde 2013). In the research project, I aim to achieve these methodological and descriptive goals in three case studies. In a first set of experiments, the Personalized Implicit Association Test (P-IAT, Olson & Fazio 2004) is applied to measure attitudes towards a two regional varieties of Dutch in Belgium, as well as Standard Belgian Dutch. The second case study delves deeper into the possibilities and limitations of the aforementioned method by entering a context dimension into the P-IAT’s design. Finally, in a third series of experiments, the Relational Responding Task (RRT, De Houwer et al. 2015) is explored and, for the first time, used to measure the social meaning of language variation.status: publishe

Implicit measures of automatic evaluation: Exploring new methods to measure language attitudes

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Measuring language attitudes in context: exploring the possibilities of the P-IAT. A case study on regional varieties of Dutch in Belgium

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A new take on comparative variation analysis

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Implicitness and experimental methods in language variation research

Implicitness, whether it is used in the context of language attitude research (Garrett 2010), work on language regard (Preston 2010) or studies focussing on the social meaning of language variation (Campbell-Kibler 2007), is a problematic concept in linguistics. Few researchers have taken up the challenge of reflecting on, and defining its nature, let alone that anyone has ever pinpointed its theoretical significance or how exactly we can measure it. Firstly, from a conceptual point of view, several definitions and interpretations of implicitness have been put forward, but in linguistics the focus tends to be on awareness/level of consciousness (e.g. Labov 1972; Kristiansen 2009; Garrett 2010; Grondelaers & Kristiansen 2013; Preston 2013; Preston 2015). In social psychology, by contrast, the concept of implicitness has been questioned extensively and researchers have proposed multidimensional definitions that recognize more facets in the concept of implicitness than just awareness, facets which are not usually considered in linguistic research. Implicitness in this field is usually understood in terms of automaticity which comprises multiple features (unintentionality, resource-independence, uncontrollability as well as unconsciousness) that need not all be present, but can qualify the way in which the outcome of an attitude measure is implicit (De Houwer et al. 2009; De Houwer & Moors 2010; Gawronski & De Houwer 2014). Such definitions of implicitness seems to allow for a conceptualization in terms of gradience, or a continuum between implicitness and explicitness. Secondly, when it comes to the theoretical importance of implicitness, it has been claimed that implicit, private, deep evaluations can access the perceptual correlates of linguistic change (Grondelaers & Kristiansen 2013; Kristiansen 2010; Preston 2013). However, studies like Soukup (2013) which showcases that the use of an open guise technique (where participants are aware of the fact that one speaker uses different language varieties), claim to be able to explain language variation in certain contexts. This may raise questions like: do we always need implicit measures? What is the theoretical significance of implicitness in the study of language variation and change? Should it occupy a privileged position when it comes to explaining the driving force behind language change as suggested by Kristiansen (2010) contrary to for instance Labov’s (2001) current more anti-subjective position? Finally, challenging the linguistic conception of implicitness has important methodological consequences. If we ask ourselves the question what exactly we mean by implicitness, and if we should find that it is a multifaceted concept, we should also ask ourselves which aspect of implicitness we are measuring with specific methods and tools. This goes for traditional sociolinguistic methods like matched guise experiments, but the question is especially relevant in the context of the recent upsurge in social psychological measures to study implicit associations. Linguists are gradually starting to use methods originally developed in social psychology, like the Implicit Association Test (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2012; Redinger 2010; Babel 2010; Pantos & Perkins 2012; Lee 2015; Rosseel et al. 2015; Loudermilk 2015; Watt & Llamas 2015). Yet, they do not always question what it is exactly that these tools measure, how these methods fit in with sociolinguistic conceptions of attitudes and social meaning, and how the measurements compare to the ones obtained from more traditional tools (e.g. matched/verbal guise experiments). This workshop aims to bring together experimental research into language regard and into the social meaning of language variation, which approaches and reflects on implicitness from different angles: conceptual, theoretical or methodological. Contributions to the workshop deal with questions such as: - What aspects of implicitness play a crucial role for linguistic attitude research and research into language variation and change? - How do different interpretations of implicitness relate to different methods to capture language regard/attitudes/social meaning of language variation? - What is the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes? Are they discrete entities or are they the extreme ends of a continuum? - What is the link between concepts like implicitness, salience and awareness? - Which research questions require measuring implicit attitudes/associations and which ones are better studied using explicit measures or a combination of both? References Babel, M. (2010). Dialect divergence and convergence in New Zealand English. Language in Society, 39(4), 437–456. Campbell-Kibler, K. (2007). Accent, (ING), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American Speech, 82(1), 32–64. Campbell-Kibler, K. (2012). The Implicit Association Test and sociolinguistic meaning. Lingua, 122(7), 753–763. De Houwer, J., & Moors, A. (2010). Implicit measures: Similarities and differences. In B. Gawronski & B. K. Payne (Eds.), Handbook of Implicit Social Cognition: Measurement, Theory and Applications. New York: Guilford Press. De Houwer, J., Teige-Mocigemba, S., Spruyt, A., & Moors, A. (2009). Implicit measures: A normative analysis and review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(3), 347–68. Garrett, P. (2010). Attitudes to Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gawronski, B., & De Houwer, J. (2014). Implicit measures in social and personality psychology. In H. T. Reis & C. M. Judd (Eds.), Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology (2nd ed., pp. 283–310). New York: Cambridge University Press. Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464–1480. Grondelaers, S., & Kristiansen, T. (2013). On the need to access deep evaluations when searching for the motor of standard language change. In T. Kristiansen & S. Grondelaers (Eds.), Language (De)standardisations in Late Modern Europe: Experimental Studies (pp. 9–52). Oslo: Novus Press. Kristiansen, T. (2009). The macro level social meaning of late modern Danish accents. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 41(1), 167–192. Kristiansen, T. (2010). Attitudes, ideology and awareness. In R. Wodak, B. Johnston, & P. Kerswill (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics (pp. 265–278). Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC: Sage. Labov, W. (1972.) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press. Labov, W. (2001.) Principles of Linguistic Change. Social Factors (Vol. 2). Oxford: Blackwell. Lee, R. (2015). Implicit associations with Welsh in two educational contexts. York Papers in Linguistics, 2(14), 81–105. Loudermilk, B. C. (2015). Implicit attitudes and the perception of sociolinguistic variation. In A. Prikhodkine & D. Preston (Eds.), Responses to Language Varieties. Variability, Processes and Outcomes (pp. 137-156). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Bejamins. Pantos, A. J., & Perkins, A. W. (2012). Measuring Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward Foreign Accented Speech. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 32(1), 3–20. Preston, D. R. (2010). Variation in language regard. In E. Zeigler, P. Gilles, & J. Scharloth (Eds.), Variatio delectat: empirische Evidenzen und theoretische Passungen sprachlicher Variation (pp. 7-27). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Preston, D. R. (2013). The influence of regard on language variation and change. Journal of Pragmatics, 52, 93–104. Preston, D. R. (2015). Does language regard vary? In A. Prikhodkine & D. Preston (Eds.), Responses to Language Varieties. Variability, Processes and Outcomes (pp. 3-36). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Bejamins. Redinger, D. (2010). Language Attitudes and Code-switching Behaviour in a Multilingual Educational Context : The Case of Luxembourg. The University of York. Rosseel, L., Speelman, D., & Geeraerts, D. (2015). Can social psychological attitude measures be used to study language attitudes? A case study exploring the Personalized Implicit Association Test. In Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics. Soukup, B. (2013). On matching speaker (dis)guises - revisiting a methodological tradition. In T. Kristiansen & S. Grondelaers (Eds.), Language (De)standardisation in Late Modern Europe: Experimental Studies (pp. 267–285). Oslo: Novus Press. Watt, D., & Llamas, C. (2015). Perception of difference: Socioindexical forms in the Scottish/English border region. Talk presented at ICLaVE 8, Leipzig.status: publishe