Abstract Images and Sociolinguitics

The Lupyan article was comprised of 4 different experiments that analyzed how our minds deal with the categorization of objects. The paper began with the interesting realization that our brains may not be able to create abstract images, something that initially took some thought to come to terms with. The idea that whenever we hear or see a word and picture it in our head, we are possibly just flashing an image of one particular instance of that object, reminded me of dreaming. We know so little about how dreams occur or why we experience what we do, but it seems publically accepted knowledge that dreams are comprised of real events, people, emotions, that have occurred throughout our recent days. Similarly, every face that we see in dreams is recognizable and can be linked to a face we saw when awake but we can never create a completely new face during a dream. This goes to support how tough true abstraction is for our brain to grasp, if we even can.

Anyways, the Lupyan article focused mainly on how descriptions of shapes can alter our perception of them in our minds. In the experiments described, subjects were asked to draw either a triangle or a three sided figure to test whether any differences in outcomes would arise. And they did. When asked to draw a triangle, the shape that was drawn is the more ‘typical’ picture of a triangle, either equilateral or isosceles. However, when asked to draw the three sided shape, the shapes drawn moved further away from the ‘typical’ triangle and showed more variance. The ultimate take away from the article is the information it provided us on how representations occur in our brains: that our brains categorize things into “idealized perceptual states” (21) which can be elicited by language. This shows the important and influence that language can have on how we perceive the world inside of our brains.

The Rickford article was a complete 180 from the Lupyan article but was still interesting to read. Rickford’s begins by explaining the important influence and effect the African American speech community has had over the past 30 years on American sociolinguistics.  He then goes on to contrast this by explaining the contributions sociolinguistics have provided the African American speech community which are thoroughly lacking. He describes several of the issues at hand: how African Americans are underrepresented in the linguistic community, the misrepresentations of African Americans community within writings have caused an “impression that black speech is the lingo of criminals” (171), and then many more social and legal reasons which have negatively affected the African American communities. Rickford then provides a call to action, giving the reader several possible solutions to some of the problems he raised. He names two main activities in which we can get involved in order to begin the process of giving back. The first focuses on scholarly/academic changes such as training and employing more African American linguists, making legal contributions to employment issues, and just getting involved in classrooms with African American students. The second activity is to mainly be a positive individual and role model within one’s community by tutoring, helping out in the soup kitchens, initiating book drives and so on. Rickford’s main goal of the paper is to explain the one sided relationship between sociolinguistics and the African American speech community, and then provide us with the methods we can use to go about helping to bridge the gap that is currently limiting the relationship between American sociolinguistics and the African American speech community.