Chinese Students' Attitudes toward African American Standard and Vernacular English

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first sociolinguistic matched-guise experiment that examined Chinese students' attitudes toward African American English in both its standard and vernacular variants. This pilot study explored Chinese students' implicit bias--if any--toward African American English compared to white American English. For this purpose, seventy-two undergraduate Chinese students pursuing their studies in the US rated standard and vernacular English recordings of a White American female speaker and an African American female speaker. To optimize the validity of this experiment, two non-guises were included as distractors. The findings suggest that the participants held a more positive attitude toward White American English. Interestingly, female respondents rated the African American guise slightly higher than their male counterparts. Finally, when the African American speaker's teaching-related traits were rated, participants favored the standard over the vernacular recording. In sum: the findings suggest that respondents might have an existing/emerging implicit bias toward the African American speaker.