The Cognitive and Affective Bases of Accent Attitudes

Mary Chiotti's talk "The Cognitive and Affective Bases of Accent Attitudes." The talk was presented at the Linguistics and English Language (LEL) Research Seminar at the Univeristy of Manchester on 30 November 2021. The area of this reseaerch is socio-psycholinguistics.

Abstract:

The study examines the formation of accent attitudes. According to the social-psychological tripartite model, attitudes are formed from cognition (beliefs), affect (feelings), and/or past, present, or future behaviours towards an attitude object (Eagly & Chaiken, 2014; Fazio, 2007). The impact of affect and cognition on attitude formation has been extensively examined in social psychology (e.g. Crites, Frabrigar & Petty, 1994), but within sociolinguistics, besides Cargile, Giles, Ryan, and Bradac's (1994) theoretical contribution, there has been no contrastive examination of the components' influence on accent attitudes.
To examine whether attitudes toward six English-English accents are cognition- or affect-based, this study used affective and cognitive persuasive messages and evaluative adjectives. The participants (47) were exposed to trials of the following format: a cognitive or affective persuasive message, followed by an accent recording, followed by cognitive and affective evaluative adjectival scales.
Results indicate that the messages and adjectives influence the attitudes toward the standard English-English variety cognitively and those toward the non-standard English-English varieties affectively. Therefore, primarily cognitive or affective accent-attitudinal formations depend on the (non)standard status of the accents. The association among cognition, affect, and (non)standardness is discussed in the context of public domains that have an impact on language ideology (e.g. education).

References
Cargile, A. C., Giles, H., Ryan, E. B., & Bradac, J. J. (1994). Language attitudes as a social process: A conceptual model and new directions. Language & Communication, 14(3), 211–236.
Crites, S. L., Fabrigar, L. R., & Petty, R. E. (1994). Measuring the affective and cognitive properties of attitudes: conceptual and methodological Issues. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20(6), 619–634.
Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (2014). Attitude research in the 21st century: The current state of knowledge. In D. Albarracin, B. Johnson, & M. Zanna (Eds), The Handbook of Attitudes (pp. 743–767). Mahwah: Taylor and Francis.
Fazio, R. H. (2007). Attitudes as object–evaluation associations of varying strength. Social Cognition, 25(5), 603–637. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2007.25....