Mády, Katalin

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How can a conservative language user be identified? – an approach viaimplicit and explicit language attitudeIntroduction. Leading groups in sound change processes can be defined based on theirage, gender, or social status [1]. Additionally, language attitude is often mentioned as apotentical factor for sound change, but this aspect has been studied to a smaller extent.One possible reason is that language attitude is difficult to measure reliably. When fillingin a questionnaire, participants might try to satisfy the expectations of the researcherrather than show their real attitude. Another problem is that explicit and implicit (un-conscious) attitude [3] often diverge. At the same time, in some cases it is desirableto categorise participants as conservative and liberal language users. In sound changeprocesses that seem to have ended before their completion, investigation of the degreeof conservativism can provide information about the current state of the process. It ispossible that the initial and the potentially final state of the process will coexist in thelanguage and function as a social marker.Such an uncompleted sound change process is the neutralisation process of vowelquantity in unstressed high vowels in Hungarian. The process might have been triggeredby a weakened perception for spectral differences between long and short vowels that aremost obvious for low and least for high short–long vowel pairs. [2] found that old listenersrelied to spectral differences for unstressed high and mid vowels to a larger extent thanyoung participants.Experiment. Implicit attitude was measured based on a set of concatenated 34 sponta-neous utterances. The data set contained 19 utterances with substandard linguistic formsand 7 disfluencies (funcioning as distractors). Native Hungarian participants listened tothe chain of the sentences and were asked to press a button if they hear something thatis incorrect. The categorisation of implicit attitude was performed based on the numberof spotted stigmatised forms. For explicit attitude, a questionnaire containing 6 assump-tions such as “People used to speak more correctly in former times” was used. Degree ofagreement was given on a 5 point scale.F1 and F2 of unstressed /o/ and /u/ were manipulated from the least (= long) to themost (= short) centralised vowel quality in 9 steps, while duration was constant. Targetwords were embedded in carrier sentences. 13 young and 12 old listeners participated ina forced choice identification experiment in which they had to decide whether they heardthe sentence with the short or the corresponding long vowel. The dependent variable wasthe steepness of GLMM-based logistic regression curves for each subject.Results: A repeated measures MANOVA showed a weak effect of implicit language at-titude on vowel quantity perception based on tenseness (p = 0.055). Age and explicitattitude had no effect. The missing impact of age suggests that the loss of perceptual dis-tinction between long and short vowels is not an ongoing sound change process at present.However, the impact of implicite attitude on perception shows that the phenomenon doesplay a role as a social marker.References[1] William Labov. Principles of linguistic change: internal factors. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 1994.[2] Katalin Ma´dy. Shortening of long high vowels in Hungarian: a perceptual loss? In Proc. Socio-phonetics at the crossroads of speech variation, processing and communication, page 4, Pisa, Italy,2010.[3] Fritz Strack and Roland Deutsch. Reflective and impulsive determinants of social behavior. Person-ality and Social Psychology Review, 8(3):220–247, 2004.

Implicit and explicit language attitude in a sound change process

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