The relational responding task (RRT): a novel approach to measuring social meaning of language variation.

Recently, sociolinguistic attitude research has adopted a number of new implicit attitude measures developed in social psychology. Especially the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has proven a successful new addition to the sociolinguist's toolbox. Despite its relative success, the IAT has a number of limitations, such as the fact that it measures the association between two concepts (e.g. 'I' and 'skinny') without controlling for the relationship between those two concepts (e.g. 'I am skinny' vs. 'I want to be skinny'). The Relational Responding Task (RRT), a novel implicit attitude measure recently developed by social psychologists, makes up for exactly that limitation by presenting participants with full propositions expressing beliefs rather than loose concepts. In this paper, we present a study that explores the RRT as a novel implicit measure of language attitudes. We employ the method to investigate the social meaning of two varieties of Dutch: Standard Belgian Dutch and colloquial Belgian Dutch. In total 391 native speakers of Belgian Dutch took part in the study. A training effect in the data aside, our results show that the latter variety is associated with dynamism, while the former is perceived as prestigious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]