Measuring linguistic attitudes with auditory affective priming: Attitudinal variation towards varieties of Dutch

The objective of this work is twofold. It sets out to contribute to the study of language attitudes on a methodological as well as a descriptive level. The main goal of the study is the methodological one. Notwithstanding some exceptions (e.g. Preston 1982), quantitative language attitude research has known little methodological innovation since the introduction of the matched-guise technique in the 1960s (Lambert et al. 1960). This relative methodological stagnation forms a stark contrast with the recent explosion of new methods in social psychology. The latter field is heavily invested in the study of attitudes and has witnessed the development of a large amount of new attitude measures in the last few decades (Petty et al. 2009; Gawronski & De Houwer 2014). In this thesis, we investigate whether linguistic attitude research can take advantage of these recent developments in psychological attitude research: is it possible to use those new attitude measures to study the social meaning of language variation?

The second goal of our research is a descriptive one. In the past decades, attitudes towards Dutch language variation have been relatively understudied. In the Netherlands, this situation is changing as more linguistic attitude studies are being carried out (cf. recent work by Grondelaers et al. 2009; Grondelaers & Van Hout 2010). By contrast, in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, there is still much work to be done. Against this background, we aim to make a contribution to the emerging picture of the language attitudinal landscape in Flanders.

To accomplish these goals, three studies were conducted. These studies focus on three different social psychological attitude measures and feature five varieties of Belgian Dutch. The first study explores the Personalized Implicit Association Test (P-IAT, Olson & Fazio 2004) to measure attitudes towards Standard Belgian Dutch and two regional varieties of Belgian Dutch (Chapter 2). The P-IAT is compared to two other attitude measures in this study: a direct rating task and a second social psychological technique called affective priming (AP, Speelman et al. 2013). Following up on the successful implementation of the P-IAT as a language attitude measure in the first study, the second study continues the exploration of the P-IAT. Experimental methods like the P-IAT often decontextualise the attitude object. Given the abundant evidence in both the social psychological and sociolinguistic literature that context significantly influences attitudes (e.g. Gawronski & De Houwer 2014; Campbell-Kibler 2007; Soukup 2013a), we set out to investigate whether we could introduce context cues in the design of the P-IAT. If successful, the method could be used to measure attitudes in a more contextualised way. In the final study, we investigate the potential of the Relational Responding Task (RRT, De Houwer et al. 2015) as a measure for language attitudes. The RRT is used to measure which social meaning listeners associate with Standard Belgian Dutch and Colloquial Belgian Dutch.

To provide the necessary background for the studies, we first present a state of the art of attitude measurement in linguistics and social psychology. In addition to this overview, we discuss in detail how the social psychological measures under study (AP, the P-IAT and the RRT) function. This is followed by a comparative review of their procedural characteristics, which points out potential advantages and shortcomings in the light of their use in sociolinguistic attitude research.

Overall, on the methodological level, the results are promising: we have been able to successfully implement the P-IAT and RRT to measure language attitudes. However, further research is required to obtain a more thorough understanding of certain procedural aspects of the methods, but also to investigate a number of theoretical issues, such as the categorization processes involved in language attitudes. From a descriptive perspective, the results of our studies corroborate a number of findings that have come out of previous research and add to them. For instance, language users hold very positive attitudes towards Standard Belgian Dutch. This variety is particularly associated with status and competence and formal usage contexts, although it is also perceived positively in informal situations. Supraregional varieties of Dutch, by contrast, are exclusively associated with informal situations. Speakers of these varieties are perceived as sounding dynamic and trendy. Contrary to previous research, we have been able to measure these associations with supraregional Dutch using a direct attitude measure.

The final chapter of this thesis situates our research in a larger framework to illustrate its theoretical relevance. Although the main objective of this work is to provide novel tools for sociolinguistic research on language attitudes, it also goes beyond this methodological aim. That is to say, our work fits within the tradition of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. This emerging field aims to combine the strengths of sociolinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, namely the empirical study of intralinguistic variation and the study of meaning (Geeraerts & Kristiansen 2015). That Cognitive Sociolinguistic project takes shape in this thesis through the study of the social meaning language users attribute to language variation.

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