Psycholinguistic Approaches

Author(s):  
Brandon C. Loudermilk

The fundamental goal of the study of sociolinguistic cognition is to characterize the computational stages and cognitive representations underlying the perception and production of sociolinguistic variation. This chapter discusses psycholinguistic approaches in four sections. The first section discusses different methods for examining how dialectal variation is represented, perceived, and learned. The second section reviews studies investigating the role of sociolinguistic stereotypes in speech processing. The third section explores the attitudinal aspects of language variation by presenting two recent studies using innovative variations of the matched-guise technique. It concludes by introducing the implicit association test, which may be able to address some of the limitations of alternative methods. The fourth section reports on studies that use eye tracking and event-related brain potentials to investigate sociolinguistic cognition.

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 282-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marieke Dewitte ◽  
Jan De Houwer ◽  
Ann Buysse

We report a study that was designed to investigate attachment-related differences in the implicit self-concept and to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) in the context of attachment research. Two variants of the IAT were used to assess implicit relational self-esteem and relational anxiety after stress induction. Results showed that both the relational self-esteem and relational anxiety IAT (1) were meaningfully related to individual differences in attachment style and (2) predicted cognitive and affective reactions to attachment-related distress in addition to and beyond self-report measures of attachment. The results provide evidence for the reliability and validity of the IAT as an index of the implicit attachment self-concept.


Sociology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (5) ◽  
pp. 967-976 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Schaap ◽  
Jeroen van der Waal ◽  
Willem de Koster

Many studies invoke the concept of the Bourdieusian habitus to account for a plethora of stratified patterns uncovered by conventional social-scientific methods. However, as a stratum-specific, embodied and largely non-declarative set of dispositions, the role of the habitus in those stratified patterns is typically not adequately scrutinised empirically. Instead, the habitus is often attributed theoretically to an empirically established link between stratification indicators and an outcome of interest. In this research note, we argue that combining conventional methods in stratification research with latency-based measures such as the Implicit Association Test enables better measurement of the habitus. This sociological application of Implicit Association Tests enables researchers to: (1) identify empirically the existence of different habitus among different social strata; and (2) determine their role in the stratified patterns to which they have thus far been attributed theoretically.


2010 ◽  
Vol 218 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Popa-Roch ◽  
Florian Delmas

Self-concept is accessible information that can be used when facing a demanding task. Based on findings suggesting that effects observed in Implicit Association Tests (IATs) could be partially explained by the procedural features of the task, we investigated the role of participants’ self-inclusion in target categories for group IATs. We propose that IAT constraints lead participants to use self-relevant heuristics related to their membership of target categories in order to respond rapidly, which contributes to IAT group preferences. Thus positive IAT effects should dramatically diminish if participants were induced not to use self-related heuristics. Study 1 showed that when mapping outgroup names and idiosyncratic characteristics of participants onto the same category during the IAT task, the IAT effect no longer occurs. Study 2 replicated these findings when associating outgroup-participants’ idiosyncratic characteristics prior to the completion of the standard IAT. Therefore inhibiting the use of self-related heuristics reduces IAT effects. The implications of our results for the construct validity of prejudice IATs are discussed.


Author(s):  
Mitja D. Back ◽  
Stefan C. Schmukle ◽  
Boris Egloff

Abstract. Recently, the role of method-specific variance in the Implicit Association Test (IAT) was examined ( McFarland & Crouch, 2002 ; Mierke & Klauer, 2003 ). This article presents a new content-unspecific control task for the assessment of task-switching ability within the IAT methodology. Study 1 showed that this task exhibited good internal consistency and stability. Studies 2-4 examined method-specific variance in the IAT and showed that the control task is significantly associated with conventionally scored IAT effects of the IAT-Anxiety. Using the D measures proposed by Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji (2003 ), the amount of method-specific variance in the IAT-Anxiety could be reduced. Possible directions for future research are outlined.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Fourakis ◽  
Jeremy Cone

A classic finding in the person perception literature is that information order is an important factor in the impressions we form of others. But how does order influence the formation of implicit evaluations? In three preregistered experiments including nearly 900 participants, we find evidence for a strong primacy effect even at the implicit level. This occurred on an affect misattribution procedure (Study 1), an evaluative priming task (Study 2), and an implicit association test (Study 3). These findings suggest that, just as explicit impressions are susceptible to primacy effects, so too are implicit ones. Implications for theories of evaluative conditioning and attitudes are discussed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0261927X2110227
Author(s):  
Carlos Romero-Rivas ◽  
Charlotte Morgan ◽  
Thomas Collier

In this study, participants were presented with two tasks: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), and a mock trial task. In both tasks, the auditory stimuli were produced by native or foreign-accented speakers, and presented either free of noise or mixed with background white noise, to estimate the role of processing fluency on jurors’ appraisals. In the IAT, participants showed positive implicit biases toward native speech, and negative implicit biases toward foreign-accented speech. In the mock trial task, participants gave much harsher sentences to the foreign-accented than native defendant, but only when defendants’ statements were free of noise. Moreover, we found that participants’ implicit biases were a relevant predictor of the sentences they gave to the defendants. Our results suggest that categorization/stereotyping is the main mechanism responsible for the effect of defendants’ accents on jurors’ appraisals, and that members of an estimated group who violate social norms are punished more severely.


Author(s):  
Maddalena Marini ◽  
Sandro Rubichi ◽  
Giuseppe Sartori

Explicit measures can be affected by self-involvement in processing of a message (Johnson & Eagly, 1989). Here, we show that self-involvement in a counter-stereotypical message also influences implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). In our study, racial attitudes changed only after reading a counter-stereotypical scenario in which participants were asked to imagine themselves as victims of an assault as opposed to simply imagine an assault to a person. This shift did not depend on evaluative instructions and it was transient as it was no longer present after 1 week. These results suggest that the self-involvement might be an important factor in shifting implicit measures.


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