Chips or caviar, lazy or loyal? Investigating neural correlates of accent-related stereotypes about Frisian speakers of Dutch

A common finding in the literature is that standard accents are associated with status, while regional accents are associated with social attractiveness. An issue with these studies, however, is that a questionnaire-based evaluation method is not informative regarding the neural processes that occur while these association are activated. The present study therefore compared the electrophysiological brain responses in subjects hearing a series of accent-congruent versus accent-incongruent statements; these statements were either made by a Frisian (regional) or Dutch (standard) speaker. It was hypothesized that accent-incongruent items would elicit a larger negativity than accent-congruent stimuli around 400ms (N400) post stimulus-onset, reflecting difficulties integrating speaker and message. Furthermore, in the analyses a comparison was made between Frisian and Dutch subjects. It was expected that participants who heard a speaker from their own group utter negative but accent-congruent stimuli, would show a larger N400 effect compared to subjects from the other group, due to not having the same implicit associations with this accent. Similarly, participants who heard positive but accent-incongruent stimuli from a fellow group-member were expected to display a smaller N400 effect compared to the other group. While some differences between accents or groups were significant, no evidence in favor of these hypotheses was found. A number of possible explanations for this lack of effect is discussed, as well as suggestions to improve further work in this field.