Implicit attitudes and the perception of sociolinguistic variation

We investigated individual differences in processing the social dimensions of speech, addressing whether the degree of implicit stereotypical attitude towards language variants modulates brain activity during comprehension. Subjects listened to spoken stories, in which sentence-final critical words were manipulated for ing/in’ variant which was congruent/incongruent with the variants in the preceding discourse and which was typical/atypical of speaker dialect. Subjects participated in an Implicit Association Test as a measure of language attitudes towards ing/in’ variation and were classified as high or low stereotype. Results showed that listeners with low IAT scores had higher N400-like negativities while processing word variants that violated dialectal expectancies (ing uttered by a Southern speaker and in’ spoken by a Californian). Our results provide evidence that the cognitive mechanisms that support language comprehension are sensitive not just to what is said, but also to how it is said, who says it, and who hears it.