Mental Representation of Words Across Cultures

In his paper, Rickford discusses the importance of the African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) to sociolinguistics. Though African-American speak has been noted in pop culture, I was fascinated to see a formalized study of AAVE, and shocked that very little study had been given to this subject previously. For example, Rickford lists several grammatical attributes of AAVE, such as removal of the present tense –s, use of “be done,” use of “finna,” use of “be,” etc. Though I’m sure many of us have recognized the use of “finna” for example, it’s interesting to see these patterns of speech being presented as a sociolinguistic study.

Lupyan’s paper also presents interesting thoughts about the intersection of psychology and language. He talks about mental representation of language, using a triangle as an example. He proves that there is a default perception of certain objects, such as triangles or dogs—so much that people can even determine a “better” triangle from a set of various scalene, isosceles, and rotated triangles. Lupyan also experimented with asking people to draw a “triangle” vs. a “three-sided polygon.” He found that people were more likely to draw a canonical triangle when asked to draw a triangle, whereas drawings were more variable for a three-sided polygon even though formally, a triangle is equivalent to a three-sided polygon.

Together, Rickford and Lupyan discussions made me wonder about the cultural influence in learning and representing language. For example, do the mental representations of words vary between someone who grew up learning regular English and someone who grew up closely acquainted with AAVE? Assuming that mental representations of words depend heavily on experience and familiarity, do mental representations differ for people learning English as a second language (aka people who’ve spent most of their lives in a different country/culture)? How does this effect one’s learning and comprehension abilities?