Splitting Evaluative Association Measures Reveals How Sociolinguistic Context Shapes Implicit Attitudes Towards Regional and Minority Languages

We present three studies examining evaluative associations as manifestations of implicit attitudes towards languages in three sociolinguistically distinct bilingual communities: Lombard–Italian, Moselle Franconian–German, and Welsh–English. Using a Go/No-Go Association Task (GNAT) that controls for spurious priming effects and subsequently allows split analyses, study 1 evidenced strongly negative attitudes towards Lombard across measures. Study 2 uncovered a similar trend towards Moselle Franconian, but only in response to pictures following words that required a Go response, not for pictures that followed non-target words. In study 3, although the GNAT failed to detect any significant associations, split analysis revealed that participants responded faster to positive pictures following non-target English words. Therefore, by splitting data according to the Go/NoGo status of the attitude object, we can achieve finer characterizations of implicit attitudes, while highlighting the prominent role of sociolinguistic context in modulating activation of each language in regional/minority language communities.