I appreciate Rickford for addressing race issues that are still pertinent in today’s society almost a decade after the paper’s publication. Rickford starts his paper by stating the contributions the African American speech community has made for the sociolinguistic field. Specifcally, he states how AAVE data “richly exemplifies processes of sociolinguistic variation and change.” AAVE data has contributed the analysis of social class, and variable rules (because of copula absence, which is used in a widely used variable rule program). Rickford then discusses how little representation in linguistic departments there is of US born African Americans (reason to believe it’s 0!). Afterwards, Rickford discusses how language is an element in racial discrimination and injustice in the workplace, courts, etc. Rickford suggests a variety of routes that sociolinguists can take in order to “give back” to the African American speech community.  Among these are educating all about cross-cultural stereotyping and miscommunication, and studying how AAVE-speaking employees actually perform on the job. I personally was interested in the suggestions of improving the teaching of reading to African American children. I think it would be clever to teach kids in their native dialect, and transfer those skills to reading in a standard variety. It reminds me of the philosophy I was encouraged to adapt at the summer camp I worked this past summer for kids with chronic illnesses. I was encouraged to “meet kids where they’re at.”

Lupyan’s paper discussed how mental representations constituting the concept of a triangle differ depending no how it is activated. The generic label “triangle” is activated like an idealized perceptual state that highlights the features that best distinguish triangles (in this case, equilateral triangles are the “idealized state”). Even referring to shapes as triangles rather than three sides polygons led people to judge near-equilateral triangles as more equilateral (idealized). Thus, different language modified our representation of a triangle and speaks to language’s role in human cognition.