Investigating the relationship between language exposure and explicit and implicit language attitudes towards Welsh and English

Gruffydd, Ianto ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6242-9411, Tamburelli, Marco, Breit, Florian and Bagheri, Hamidreza 2025. Investigating the relationship between language exposure and explicit and implicit language attitudes towards Welsh and English. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 44 (1) , pp. 79-106. 10.1177/0261927X241294031

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Abstract

Positive attitudes toward regional/minority languages are an essential precondition to language maintenance/revitalization. We investigate implicit and explicit attitudes toward Welsh and English and their relationship with childhood and adolescent age exposure among adult Welsh speakers from northwest Wales. Results indicate that implicit and explicit attitude constructs diverge and therefore bear differentially on language maintenance/revitalization. Specifically, comparing speaker data from the Language and Social Background Questionnaire with results from two independent studies, employing the Attitudes towards Languages (AToL) Scale and an Implicit Association Task respectively, we show that the implicit measure reveals a positive correlation between attitudes and exposure in primary school age. Conversely, the AToL returned no statistically significant factors, suggesting differential sensitivity of the explicit and implicit measures. We argue that an understanding of both types of attitude constructs, and attending to exposure levels especially as they relate to intergenerational transmission, is necessary to implement an effective language maintenance/revitalization strategy.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
ISSN:	0261-927X
Funders:	Economic and Social Research Council
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	29 October 2024
Date of Acceptance:	10 October 2024
Last Modified:	17 Dec 2024 10:05
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/173316

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