Abstract articles about Abstraction

Gary Lupyan used four experiments to describe the issue of abstraction when describing and drawing triangles, all due to the certain words used. It was very interesting to read about how describing the task with “triangle” or “three-sided figure” could produce different results.

All of the experiments produced a similar trend. In Experiment 1, using the word “triangle” produced 

more symmetric (equilateral or isosceles) triangles, while describing it as “three-sided figures” produced less symmetric drawings. Experiment 2 explored response time, and again showed that “triangle” had a faster recognition and RT. Experiment 3 concluded that using different names to refer to the same shape results in differing interpretations of its shape. Lastly, Experiment 4 used varying pictures of triangle-shaped bacteria. As expected, the dish where the shapes were mostly uniform and “triangle” were thought to have the highest drug efficacy.

Reading this made me think about how using different words to represent the same item can take longer to understand and process. Coming here from the Midwest, I ran into this issue a lot when saying “pop”, not “soda”. Although they’re the exact same, it took me longer to understand what the other person was saying, and vice versa when I said “pop”. Also, I thought about using “Kleenex” or “tissue”. Hearing “Kleenex” is similar to hearing “triangle”; you automatically know to grab a facial tissue. But when you hear “tissue”, it takes a little longer to decide because it is a broader category (facial tissue, paper towel, etc.).

John Rickford’s article was very interesting to me, because it connected linguistics, specifically sociolinguistics, to society and brought up rising, current issues. Rickford focuses on the African American speech community and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). First, he describes a few distinct features of AAVE, like copula absence (omitting connecting words) and tense-aspect markers (“He be walking”, “He’s finna go”). These are just a few of the ways, Rickford explains, that AAVE has contributed to sociolinguistic data, with even more data about social class, ethnicity, and style. African American speech in general has also been a hot topic, like with rapping or hip-hop.

Rickford mainly argues that the linguistic community has not really done as much as it can for the African American community, and their community needs all the help it can get. There is an underrepresentation of Blacks in the linguistic community, and those who are in positions of education need better instruction on how to properly teach students. Another issue is that the African American community is put in a negative light when, linguistically, it is portrayed as mostly vulgar, sexualized content. Data from various studies, including Rickford’s, found that the struggling kids in dominantly African American communities, when compared to dominantly white communities, benefitted academically from the Bridge program and from using readings with AAVE instead of SE.

It’s always important, in my opinion, to think about how our research and data collection is helping or hurting the community to gauge whether not it should be continued.