10/30 Reading Response

In this week's readings we focused on Gary Lupyan's "The Paradox of the Universal Triangle: Concepts, Languages, and Prototypes" as well as John Russell Rickford's "Unequal Partnership: Sociolinguistics and the African American Speech Community". Lupyan's article dealt with prototypical mental representations. He started out with a discussion of how our representation of a "dog" will progressively get specific in features that are "diagnostic" of the concept dog (Lupyan 4). That is to say, our mental images of a dog will converge to a prototypical dog, like a dog one might see on the street each day. To extend these findings, Lupyan considers the same phenomenon with respect to triangles. Over the course of several studies, he looks at the variance and type of triangles drawn when he asks participants to draw a "triangle" or a "three-sided polygon". In the former case, participants tended to draw more standard, prototypical triangles (particularly an equilateral triangle). In the latter case, there was greater variance between participants and less resemblance to the prototypical triangle examples.

This sort of mental bias, according to the Rickford reading, extends far beyond dogs and polygons. This reading explains that while the linguistic community has benefitted greatly from the study of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), but the communities who helped with the research have benefitted little. Rickford explains that, in a similar way to how we represent triangles, people have an innate bias to the typical or expected version of something, which can lead to prejudice against minorities like women and people of color. This bias has shaped the linguistic response to studing AAVE, in that since AAVE seems non-standard it is perceived more negatively than other forms of English, when in fact it involves many standard rules just like any other dialect.

I found these readings interesting, particularly given the concerns of social justice in the world right now. They serve as a reminder that language, like so many other things, can shape our perceptions of others and can lead to unintended discriminatory behavior. The triangle studies also reminded me of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in court. If a researcher can get such different responses from asking for a triangle and a three-sided polygon, there must be so many ways to manipulate witness testimony in court--unintentional and intentional. I remember there is one study in which participants were shown a video of a car colliding with another. Later, they were asked to estimate how fast the cars were traveling when they collided. But by varying the verb ("bumped", "collided", "crashed"), participants would vary their answer significantly. We can strive to become aware of these linguistic effects to make the world a better place.