Media Influence on Implicit and Explicit Language Attitudes

Abstract

Sociolinguists often assume that media influences language attitudes, but that assumption has not been tested using a methodology that can attribute cause. This dissertation examines implicit and explicit attitudes about American Southern English (ASE) and the influence television has upon them. Adapting methodologies and constructs from sociolinguistics, social psychology, and communications studies, I test listener attitudes before and after exposure to stereotypically unintelligent and counterstereotypically intelligent representations of Southern-accented speakers in scripted fictional television. The first attitudes experiment tests implicit attitudes through an Implicit Association Test (IAT). This experiment also serves to test sociolinguistic use of the IAT with a more holistic accent as opposed to single linguistic features. The second attitudes experiment tests the effect of television exposure on explicit attitudes towards an ASE-accented research assistant (RA). The experiments also investigate the influence of listener knowledge of regional origin of actors (speaker information), listener perception of how closely television represents the world around them (perceived realism), listener exposure to the South, and listener identity. The hypothesis is that those who hear counterstereotypically intelligent Southern characters will rate a Southern-accented research assistant higher in intelligence than those who hear stereotypically unintelligent Southern characters. The same pattern will hold in the auditory-based IAT. Accents in both the implicit and explicit attitudes experiments are viewed holistically, including multiple features rather than focusing on the most salient features. To clarify results related to the speaker information and perceived realism variables, a separate experiment tests how successful listeners are at differentiating natives from performers of regionally accented American English.

Results indicate that televised representations of Southern accents affect explicit, but not implicit attitudes. Participants who heard intelligent Southern characters rated an ASE-accented RA higher in competence than those who heard unintelligent Southern characters. Several demographic variables influenced results regardless of the stereotypicality of the speakers that the listener heard in the television clips, including self-identified race and exposure to Southern television. While implicit attitudes were not affected by television in this case, the IAT was successfully adapted for use with a holistic accent rather than a single feature and also captures associations between an L1 regional accent and a specific stereotype of that accent. I discuss these results in regard to language attitudes at large as well as their implications for an indirect language change model, the Associative-Propositional Evaluation (APE) model of attitudes, and cultivation theory. The dissertation argues that scripted television does influence language attitudes, but in more complex ways than a simple cause-and-effect relationship. While television can affect explicit attitudes towards individual speakers, implicit attitude shift is more difficult and may need more time and/or need a direct cause for a shift to occur. Regardless of media influence, language attitudes are affected by identity and demographic features listeners bring into the interaction with speakers.