L'ART

We're currently working on a project entitled Understanding the relationship between speaker's attitudes and linguistic behaviour across speech communities, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, grant number ES/V016377/1.
The overarching aim of the project is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the nature and role of linguistic attitudes in maintaining language diversity from a theoretical, empirical and methodological perspective.
It involves collection of quantitative data using a range of experimental techniques across five studies, and it applies interdisciplinary, cross-methodological measurements to gain a deeper understanding of linguistic attitudes in different communities with varying degrees of language recognition.

Our project benefits from state-of-the-art facilities, including a dedicated lab with two actiCHamp Plus systems for EEG recordings. This enables us to collect data on participants' event-related brain potentials (ERPs), providing an implicit measure of attitudes that occur automatically and outside of conscious awareness.

We are also engaged in developing our own research tools for the measurement of language attitudes on the explicit to implicit continuum, but also for the study of bilingual populations more broadly. In particular, we have built the L'ART Research Assistant app,  a freely available open-source app to aid researchers in the collection, storage and transfer of data for research in bilingualism and language attitudes. The first public release of the L'ART Research Client was held on 3rd May 2023.