Implicit language attitudes in Catalonia (Spain): investigating preferences for Catalan or Spanish using the Implicit Association Test

Abstract

In line with the increased interest in studying implicit language attitudes, this study aims to explore implicit attitudes towards Catalan and Spanish in the multicultural and multilingual context of Catalonia (Spain) using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). A sample of 113 adolescents completed the IAT and a set of explicit measures of attitudinal and motivational variables. Results show a general preference for Catalan over Spanish. However, differences appear when home language is taken into consideration, as participants tend to prefer their home language. The paper discusses the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes, highlighting the importance of incorporating implicit measures in language attitudes research in Catalonia.

Indexing Deficiency: Connecting Language Learning and Teaching to Evaluations of US Spanish

“…The biases derived from the MGT and the IAT, while they do not strongly correlate in this study, are also not diverging with regard to longstanding deficit perspectives of US Spanish. While the results of this study do not support the IED hypothesis, the demonstration of weak or nonexistent correlations between the bias measures contributes to the previous language attitude literature that has examined explicit and implicit bias as different processes (see McKenzie and Carrie 2018;Ianos et al 2020).…”

“…Callesano and Carter (2022) found that, when Spanish and English were contrasted in the IAT, Miami-based participants more quickly associated English + Good over Spanish + Good, an effect that was mediated by increased time spent in Miami, demonstrating how binaries shift when hegemonies shift. Similarly, Ianos et al (2020) issued an IAT and direct questionnaire to adolescents to evaluate bias towards Catalan and Spanish. IAT results showed an overall positive bias towards Catalan over Spanish, though positive bias shifted when tested against the adolescent's home language (i.e., Spanish used at home produced positive associations with Spanish).…”

Parochial Linguistic Education: Patterns of an Enduring Friction within a Divided Catalonia

“…At the same time, this demands that further studies be carried out using similar surveying approaches that are iterated over a relevant time period in order to analyse the consistency of the patterns. Alternatively, questionnaires should be combined with other methodologies to discern, for instance, between openly asserted linguistic preferences and barely conscious linguistic automatisms in fully bilingual populations (Ianos et al 2020;Aznar-Casanova et al 2020) in order to complement the profiles described here.…”