Examining Media Effects on Implicit Sociolinguistic Cognition

The broadcast media are assumed to influence people's attitudes to regional accents and the social information associated to the speaker. But until now, this has never been empirically tested. This will be the first project to investigate media effects on implicit sociolinguistic cognition, an under-researched yet prevalent element of society and human behaviour. This project focusses on media effects of implicit and explicit attitudes towards the stigmatised Glaswegian accent. This project will produce an innovative combination of methods and perspectives from sociolinguistics, psychology, and media effects research to investigate the complex interaction between media, language varieties and social identity.