Implicit Social Cognition and Language Attitudes Research

Abstract

This chapter argues for incorporation of concepts and methods from the domain of Implicit Social Cognition (ISC) into the field of language attitudes research. As support, this chapter reports on a quantitative study that employed both an audio Implicit Association Test and traditional self-report questionnaires to measure participants' implicit and explicit attitudes toward foreign and U.S. accented speech stimuli. The IAT revealed a pro-U.S. accent bias, while the explicit measure found a pro-foreign accent bias. These results support the argument that the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes as separable attitude constructs resulting from distinct mental processes is an important one for language attitudes research and that both attitude constructs should be evaluated when studying language attitudes.