Abstract
This paper seeks to improve the persuasiveness of oral health campaigns by investigating the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes to British accents. Forty-seven participants from Tayside, East Scotland, first completed an implicit task which asked participants to judge the truth value of 120 trivia statements, divided into six different accents, as quickly as possible. This was complimented by an identical written task at the end of the experiment in less pressurised conditions. Both audio and written responses to the statements were analysed using signal detection theory, which revealed that Estuary English was more persuasive than the local accent, Dundee English (p = 0.039), and the stigmatised multi-ethnolect, Multicultural London English (p = 0.002). Participants also completed an explicit task involving two matched-guise tests with the same six accents in a neutral and dental context. Results update our knowledge of explicit attitudes to British accents in a modern linguistic landscape, and shed light on correlations between implicit and explicit attitudes. Using Bassili and Brown’s (2005) Potentiated Recruitment Framework, it is argued that the relationship is mediated by participants’ self-presentation concerns and the perceived social penalties of expressing bias. Sociolinguistic implications of implicit measurement procedures are discussed regarding the development of oral health campaigns.
References
Abdi, Hervé. 2007. Signal detection theory. In Neil Salkind (ed.), Encyclopedia of measurement and statistics, 1–9. Thousand Oaks: Sage.Search in Google Scholar
Altendorf, Ulrike. 2003. Estuary English: Levelling at the interface of RP and south-eastern British English. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.Search in Google Scholar
Alvarez-Mosquera, Pedro & Alejandro Marín-Gutiérrez. 2017. Implicit language attitudes toward historically white accents in the South African context. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 37(2). 1–11.10.1177/0261927X17718349Search in Google Scholar
Bargh, John A. 1994. The four horsemen of automaticity: Awareness, intention, efficiency and control in social cognition. In Robert S. Wyer Jr & Thomas K. Skrull (eds.), Handbook of social cognition: Basic processes, 1–40. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.Search in Google Scholar
Bassili, John & Richard Brown. 2005. Implicit and explicit attitudes: Research, challenges, and theory. In Dolores Albarracín, Blair T. Johnson. & Mark P. Zanna (eds.), The handbook of attitudes, 543–574. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Search in Google Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48.10.18637/jss.v067.i01Search in Google Scholar
Berlo, David K., James B. Lemert & Robert J. Mertz. 1969. Dimensions of evaluating acceptability of message sources. Public Opinion Quarterly 33(4). 563–576.10.1086/267745Search in Google Scholar
Bodenhausen, Gawronski, Andrew Todd & Jennifer A. Richeson. 2009. Controlling prejudice and stereotyping: Antecedents, mechanisms and contexts. In Todd Nelson (ed.), Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, 111–130. New York: Psychology Press.Search in Google Scholar
Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2012. The implicit association test and sociolinguistic meaning. Lingua 122(7). 753–763.10.1016/j.lingua.2012.01.002Search in Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox & Eivind Torgersen. 2008. Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change: Linguistic innovation in London. Sociolinguistica 22. 1–23.10.1515/9783484605299.1Search in Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Paul Kerswill, Sue Fox & Eivind Torgersen. 2011. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15. 151–196.10.1111/j.1467-9841.2011.00478.xSearch in Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas & Hywel Bishop. 2007. Ideologised values for British accents. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(1). 74–93.10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00311.xSearch in Google Scholar
De Houwer, Jan, Niclas Heider, Adriaan Spruyt, Arne Roets & Sean Hughes. 2015. The relational responding task: Toward a new implicit measure. Frontiers in Psychology 6(319). 1–9.10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00319Search in Google Scholar
Fabricus, Anne. 2006. The ‘vivid sociolinguistic profiling’ of Received Pronunciation: Responses to gendered dialect-in-discourse. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(1). 111–122.10.1111/j.1360-6441.2006.00320.xSearch in Google Scholar
Garrett, Peter, Nikolas Coupland & Angie Williams. 2003. Investigating language attitudes: Social meanings of dialect, ethnicity and performance. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 15(3). 411–414.Search in Google Scholar
Giles, Howard. 1971. Patterns of evaluation to R.P., South Welsh and Somerset accented speech. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 10(3). 280–281.10.1111/j.2044-8260.1971.tb00748.xSearch in Google Scholar
Gimson, Alfred C. 1970. An introduction to the pronunciation of English, 2nd edn. London: Edward Arnold.Search in Google Scholar
Greenwald, Anthony, Debbie E. McGhee & Jordan Schwartz. 1998. Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(6). 1464–1480.10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464Search in Google Scholar
Heeger, David. 2003. Signal detection theory. http://www.cns.nyu.edu/ david/handouts/sdt/sdt.html (Accessed 1st February 2018).Search in Google Scholar
Hiraga, Yuko. 2005. British attitudes towards six varieties of English in the USA and Britain. World Englishes 24(3). 289–308.10.1111/j.0883-2919.2005.00411.xSearch in Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul. 2007. Standard and non-standard English. In David Britain (ed.), Language in the British Isles, 34–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511620782.004Search in Google Scholar
Kerswill, Paul. 2014. The objectification of ‘Jafaican’. The discoural embedding of Multicultural London English in the British media. In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.), Mediatization and sociolinguistic change. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110346831.427Search in Google Scholar
Kinzler, Katherine, Kristin Shutts & Joshua J. Correll. 2010. Priorities in social categories. European Journal of Social Psychology 40(4). 581–592.10.1002/ejsp.739Search in Google Scholar
Lalwani, Ashok, May Lwin & Kuah Leng Li. 2008. Consumer responses to English accent variations in advertising. Journal of Global Marketing 18(3–4). 143–165.10.1300/J042v18n03_07Search in Google Scholar
Lambert, Wallace, Robert Hodgson, Robert Gardner & Steven Fillenbaum. 1960. Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 80(1). 44–51.10.1037/h0044430Search in Google Scholar
Lev-Ari, Shiri & Boaz Keysar. 2010. Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46. 1093–1096.10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025Search in Google Scholar
Mai, Robert & Stefan Hoffmann. 2011. Four positive effects of a salesperson’s regional dialect in services selling. Journal of Service Research 14(4). 460–474.10.1177/1094670511414551Search in Google Scholar
Martin, Ron. 1988. The political economy of Britain’s North-South Divide. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 13(4). 389–418.10.2307/622738Search in Google Scholar
McCready, Richard B. 2008. Irish Catholicism and nationalism in Scotland: The Dundee experience, 1850–1922. Irish Studies Review 6(3). 245–252.10.1080/09670889808455609Search in Google Scholar
McKenzie, Robert & Erin Carrie. 2018. Implicit-explicit attitudinal discrepancy and the investigation of language attitude change in progress. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 39(9). 830–844.10.1080/01434632.2018.1445744Search in Google Scholar
Montgomery, Chris. 2012. The effect of proximity in perceptual dialectology. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16(5). 638–668.10.1111/josl.12003Search in Google Scholar
Mugglestone, Linda. 1997. Talking proper: The rise of accent as a social symbol. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Myles, John F. 2010. Bourdieu, language and the media. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9780230283053Search in Google Scholar
O’Keefe, Daniel J. 2002. Persuasion: Theory and research. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc.Search in Google Scholar
Pantos, Andrew J. & Andrew W. Perkins. 2012. Measuring implicit and explicit attitudes toward foreign accented speech. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 32(1). 3–20.10.1177/0261927X12463005Search in Google Scholar
Parsons, Gudrun. 1998. From “RP” to “Estuary English”: The concept ‘received’ and the debate about British pronunciation standards. Unpublished MA thesis, Hamburg University. https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/parsons_ma.pdf.Search in Google Scholar
Perloff, Richard. 2010. The dynamics of persuasion: Communication and attitudes in the 21st Century. London: Routledge.10.4324/9780429196959-2Search in Google Scholar
Petty, Richard E. & John Cacioppo. 1986. The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 19. 123–205.10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60214-2Search in Google Scholar
Pichler, Heike. 2016. Uncovering discourse-pragmatic innovations: innit in Multicultural London English. In Heike Pichler (ed.), Discourse-pragmatic variation and change in English: New methods and insights, 59–111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781107295476.004Search in Google Scholar
Pine, Cynthia M, Pauline M. Adair, Alison D. Nicoll, Girvan Burnside, Poul E. Petersen, David Beighton, Angela Gillett, Ruth Anderson, Shahid Anwar, Susan Brailsford, Zdenek Broukal, Ivor G Chestnutt, Dominique Declerck, Feng X. Ping, Roberto Ferro, Ruth Freeman, Tshepo Gugushe, Rebecca Harris, Brent Lin, Edward C. M. Lo, Gerardo Maupome, Mohamed H. Moola, Sudeshni Naidoo, Francisco Ramos-Gomez, Lakshman P. Samaranayake, Swarngit Shahid, Marit S. Skeie, Christian Splieth, Betty King Sutton, Teo C. Soo & Helen Whelton. 2004a. International comparisons of health inequalities in childhood dental caries. Community Dental Health 21(1). 121–130.Search in Google Scholar
Pine, Cynthia M, Pauline M. Adair, Poul E. Petersen, Chester Douglass, Girvan Burnside, Alison D. Nicoll, Angela Gillett, Ruth Anderson, David Beighton, Bian Jin-you, Zdenek Broukal, John P. Brown, Ivor G Chestnutt, Dominique Declerck, Deidre Devine, Ivar Espelid, Guiliano Falcolini, Feng Xi Ping, Ruth Freeman, David Gibbons, Tschepo Gugusge, Rebecca Harris, Jennifer Kirkham, Edward C. M. Lo, Philip Marsh, Gerardo Maupomé, Sudeshni Naidoo, Francisco Ramos-Gomez, Betty King Sutton & Sonia Williams. 2004b. Developing explanatory models of health inequalities in childhood dental caries. Community Dental Health 21(1). 86–95.Search in Google Scholar
Pine, Cynthia, Pauline Adair, Louise Robinson, Girvan Burnside, Paula Moynihan, William Wade, James Kistler, Morag Curnow & Mary Henderson. 2016. The BBaRTS Healthy Teeth Behaviour Change Programme for preventing dental caries in primary school children: Study protocol for a cluster randomised controlled trial. Trials 17(103). 1–10.10.1186/s13063-016-1226-3Search in Google Scholar
Reinares-Lara Eva, Josefa D. Martín-Santana & Clara Muela-Molina. 2016. The effect of accent, differentiation and stigmatization on spokersperson credibility in radio advertising. Journal of Global Marketing 29(1). 15–28.10.1080/08911762.2015.1119919Search in Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Milton. 1968. Hedonism, inauthenticity and other goads toward expansion of a consistency theory. In Robert P. Abelson, Elliot Aronson, William J. McGuire, Theodore M. Newcomb, Milton J. Rosenberg, & Percy H. Tannenbaum (eds.), Theories of cognitive consistency: A sourcebook, 73–111. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally.Search in Google Scholar
Rosseel, Laura, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts. 2015. Can social psychological attitude measures be used to study language attitudes? A case study exploring the Personalized Implicit Association Test. Paper presented at 6th Conference on Quantitative Investigations in Theoretical Linguistics, Tubingen, 4–6 November.Search in Google Scholar
Rumelhart, David E. & James L. McClelland. 1986. Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Volume 1: Foundations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/5236.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Smith, Eliot R. 1996. What do connectionism and social psychology offer each other? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(5). 893–912.10.1037/0022-3514.70.5.893Search in Google Scholar
Smith, Hayley-Jane & Lance Workman. 2008. The effect of accent on perceived intelligence and attractiveness. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society, Dublin, April 2008.Search in Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 2001. Received Pronunciation: Sociolinguistic aspects. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36. 3–13.Search in Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter & Jean Hannah. 2017. A guide to varieties of English around the world. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781315192932Search in Google Scholar
Unkelbach, Christian. 2007. Reversing the truth effect: Learning the interpretation of processing fluency in judgments of truth. Journal of Experimental Psychology 33(1). 219–30.10.1037/0278-7393.33.1.219Search in Google Scholar
Wells, John. C. 1997. What is Estuary English? English teaching professional 3. 46–47. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/whatis.htm.Search in Google Scholar
Wentura, Dirk & Juliane Degner. 2010. A practical guide to sequential priming and related tasks. In Bertram Gawronski & Keith Payne (eds.), Handbook of implicit social cognition: Measurement, theory, and applications, 95–116. New York: Guilford.Search in Google Scholar
Wittenbrink, Bernd, Charles M. Judd & Bernadette Park. 2001. Spontaneous prejudice in context: Variability in automatically activated attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(5). 815–827.10.1037/0022-3514.81.5.815Search in Google Scholar
Wotschke, Ingrid. 2014. How educated English speak English: Pronunciation as social behaviour. Berlin: Frank & Timme.Search in Google Scholar
Appendix A
| Melbourne in Australia used to be named Batmania |
| Venezuela is named after Venice |
| Exodus is the first book of the Old Testament |
| Hippos can run faster than horses |
| The word goodbye comes from God be with you |
| The first remote control took eight seconds to change channels |
| In New York it is illegal to imitate an animal |
| Baseball originated in England |
| Sloths take two weeks to digest their food |
| Walt Disney was afraid of rollercoasters |
| Jacuzzi is a brand name |
| Nutmeg is poisonous if injected |
| Five percent of the worlds salt is for pretzels |
| An adult skeleton has 106 bones |
| Rats cry when they are tickled |
| Babies like high pitched singing voices |
| Baboons come from Africa and Arabia |
| Mexico’s most famous beer is Sol |
| The Sun is 1000 times larger than Earth |
| It takes one minute for brain cells to react to aspirin |
| Hot water is heavier than cold |
| Pluto was named by an 11 year old girl |
| French fries originated in Belgium |
| Pluto takes 248 years to orbit the Sun |
| The first text message read Happy New Years Eve |
| There are more than 50 different kinds of kangaroos |
| Hippos’ sweat turns red when they’re upset |
| The most popular male dog names are Max and Bailey |
| Bono was born Paul David Hewson |
| Tokyo is the city most prone to earthquakes |
| Humans develop a tail in the womb that dissolves |
| The most liked brand on Facebook is Starbucks |
| The film Titanic got three Oscars |
| Youtube started as a dating website |
| Karaoke means empty orchestra in Chinese |
| Dolphins sleep with one eye open |
| The lightest metal in the world is copper |
| Outer space is completely silent |
| Eating white chocolate helps eczema |
| Einstein failed Maths at school |
| India has four different time zones |
| It rains diamonds on Saturn |
| 30 people have been born in Antarctica |
| Tom and Jerry were originally called Jasper and Jinx |
| The Great Wall of China can be seen from Space |
| George Bush and Hugh Hefner share common ancestors |
| 30% of emails sent are spam |
| The majority of the Amazon rainforest is in Colombia |
| Ketchup was sold as a medicine in the early 19th century |
| Peanuts can be used to make dynamite |
| The most popular pin code is 1, 2, 3, 4 |
| The sum of all the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666 |
| Reno is farther west than Los Angeles |
| Vienna has the oldest zoo in the world |
| The first Olympics were held in Greece |
| Neptune is the equivalent of Greek God Aphrodite |
| Elvis Presley’s middle name is Aaron |
| Babies tend to cry in blue rooms |
| Gin is made from potatoes |
| Madrid is the noisiest city in the world |
| Grapes explode when microwaved |
| Issac Newton invented the game chequers |
| The world’s tallest building is in Dubai |
| Grapefruit dehydrates you |
| The largest recorded snowflake was 15 inches |
| A hurricane can be as high as 50,000 feet |
| Woman can read smaller print than men |
| Fortune cookies originated in Italy |
| The first sport to be filmed was baseball |
| Heart attacks occur most often on Mondays |
| The Titanic was built in Dublin |
| Cats have five eyelids |
| Sand is the main component in glass |
| 25% of British people sleep nude |
| Texas is the largest state in America |
| M & Ms stands for Mars and Murries |
| A Cadburys Crème Egg contains 170 calories |
| Italy has 10% of the worlds active volcanoes |
| Florence Nightingale invented scissors |
| Jerry Springer was born at a tube station in North London |
| Milkshakes were originally alcoholic drinks |
| A bee is more likely to sting you in rainy weather |
| School comes from the Ancient Greek ‘skhole’ |
| China is the world’s largest producer of peanuts |
| Whoopi Goldberg’s first job was a baker in New York City |
| America is home to the first underground |
| 25% of human bones are located in the spine |
| The American flag has 49 stars |
| Ciabatta bread was invented in 1500 |
| Laughter can strengthen the immune system |
| You burn more calories sleeping than watching TV |
| Captain Morgan was a Welsh pirate |
| There are 100 different drink combinations at Starbucks |
| 45% of the world is left handed. |
| Mercury is known as the red planet |
| The first mobile phone cost $4000 |
| Google was launched in 1990 |
| The giant panda is the national animal of Canada |
| Intelligent people have more magnesium in their hair |
| Police in India get paid more if they grow moustaches |
| It’s illegal to chew gum in Singapore |
| Popcorn is mostly eaten in Autumn |
| Mount Everest grows two inches every year |
| Yawning wakes you up |
| Antarctica was once as warm as California |
| Human blood has more calories than crisps |
| A group of crocodiles is called an embarrassment |
| Carrots were purple before the 12th century |
| In France, an ashtray is considered a deadly weapon |
| Humans need food more than they need sleep |
| The dot on the letter ‘i’ is called a tittle |
| Iceland’s national animal is the whale |
| Tea is the national drink of France |
| The first computer mouse was made of metal |
| The space between your fingers is called the glabella |
| In Spain artists can pay their taxes with artwork |
| Babies have more bones than adults |
| The Mojito cocktail originated in Argentina |
| A shrimp’s heart is in its head |
| Half your brain is used for vision |
Appendix B
Matched-guise test neutral passage
I think the best way to get from Birmingham University to Cardiff University is to head west toward New Fosse Way. This will lead you to Bristol Road, where you need to continue for about 3 miles. At the roundabout take the second exit onto the M5 to London. After about 60 miles, exit onto the M4 towards South Wales. Continue onto Eastern Avenue and then take the A470 exit towards the City Centre. Merge onto North Road and turn left onto Corbett Road where Cardiff University is situated.
Matched-guise test dental passage
There are several ways you can avoid tooth decay. First you should brush your teeth twice a day for two minutes. Brushing your tongue will also freshen your breath and remove bacteria. Second, flossing helps prevent decay because it gets rid of plaque and food particles which a toothbrush cannot reach. Finally, it is important to avoid sugary food and drinks, and this also benefits your wider health. If you do have sugar, try to limit it to mealtimes rather than as a snack.
©2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
