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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 524

Part of Session 171: Experimental methods in the study of social meaning (Other abstracts in this session)

Accent and Implicit Cognition: preliminary results on social class and evaluation from Glasgow

Authors: Robertson, Duncan; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Scheepers, Christoph
Submitted by: Robertson, Duncan (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom)

Despite over two decades worth of research carried out on automatic evaluative responses in social psychology, these have rarely had a sociolinguistic focus, or utilised auditory stimuli (Castelli et al 2003). More recently, however, studies on implicit attitudes in relation to sociolinguistics have been examined (e.g. Babel 2009; Pantos 2010;Campbell-Kibler 2010). The findings of the relatively sparse work so far appear to point towards implicit associations being triggered by linguistically derived social information in much the same manner as they are for visually derived social information.

With this in mind, the main research questions for this project were formulated as follows:

1. Does social information encoded within the speech signal impact upon the implicit associations made by listeners?

2. Does social information encoded within the speech signal trigger implicit associations in the same manner as visually-derived social information?

3. Do the implicit associations formed by listeners towards speakers of different varieties of English correlate with the findings of explicit attitude studies on those varieties?

Rather than using Implicit Association Tests, the main focus of this project is to adapt the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) for sociolinguistic research (cf. Scheepers et al 2008). This paradigm has been extended to three original methodologies here in order to investigate whether hearing different social accents in Glasgow can trigger listeners into making different associations between spoken words and images.

The first such experiment was carried out between subjects, with one group hearing a working class speaker and the other half a middle class speaker. Participants were asked to rate various images in terms of how strongly they associated them with the target words. The results returned no significant effect of speaker accent, with listeners displaying only a very small preference towards middle class images over working class images, regardless of speaker heard. This did, however, show that the visual and auditory stimuli were balanced in terms of salience and semantic valence.

A second experiment used recordings of different speakers paired with the same visual stimuli as before, but added multiple distractors. Another group of subjects were tested, each hearing various speakers. Participants were asked to choose images they most strongly associated with target words heard. This revealed a clear trend for participants showing a preference for middle-class images in sets displaying objects and working-class targets in sets displaying brand logos. This is interesting as associating words with abstract concepts, and representations of tangible items, involve different cognitive processes. These trends, however, were not found to be statistically significant under linear mixed effects models.

The preliminary findings of the third experiment to be presented will utilize an established measure of implicit cognition, circumventing issues encountered in previous experiments by recording participant eye movements in real time, in relation to the same stimuli. It is hypothesized here that speaker accent should have a significant effect on listener fixation, reflecting online processing, in contrast with the offline experiments previously conducted.