The Department of Contemporary English and Multilingualism (DoCEM) and the Experimental Phonology and Phonetics Lab (EPPL) are excited to announce the upcoming Phon&Phontastic meeting.
Date: Wednesday 14 January 2026
Time: 11:30
Venue: Room 211
“Implicit and explicit attitudes towards BATH-TRAP in Northern English and Southern English in England”
Robert McKenzie (Northumbria University)
Everyone is warmly invited.
Abstract of the talk:
Knowledge of public attitudes towards language-based diversity can help uncover wider societal prejudices. Nonetheless, sociolinguists and sociophoneticians are increasingly aware of the limitations of using traditional explicit self-report measures to gauge attitudes towards linguistic variation. Accordingly, a growing number of studies have adapted socio-psychological techniques - most particularly the implicit association test (IAT) - to access participants’ more deeply embedded, and durable, implicit evaluations of linguistic stimuli.
This talk discusses the merits of employing both implicit and explicit attitudinal measures in language attitude research. Specifically, the talk introduces the ongoing Speaking of Prejudice research project and details the results from a recent large-scale study (McKenzie and McNeill, 2023; McKenzie et al., 2025; McKenzie, 2026) investigating English nationals’ (N=306) implicit and explicit evaluations of the status and social attractiveness of the use of Northern English [a] and Southern English [ɑː] in the BATH lexical set. It is argued that the study findings underline the value of employing a dual processing framework, involving the use of implicit and explicit attitudinal measures, to help language scientists better understand the complex, and often compensatory, evaluations which individuals hold towards linguistic variation.
References
- McKenzie, R.M. (2026, in press) Implicit and explicit language attitudes and language attitude change. Language and Linguistic Compass
- McKenzie, R.M., K. McCarty and M. Huang (2025) Implicit and explicit linguistic biases: The influence of social dominance orientation (SDO) upon hierarchical language attitudes. Lingua 319: article 10392805. [external link]
- McKenzie, R.M. and A. McNeill (2023) Implicit and Explicit Language Attitudes: Mapping linguistic prejudice and attitude change in England. London: Routledge. [external link]