Studies and Dialects

In this week’s readings, Lupyan explores the significance of language as the medium through which we label, interpret, and categorize objects and the world around us. Using triangles as an exemplar, he presents four experiments that demonstrate the link between cognizing abstract objects and language. For example, he found that calling a triangle a “triangle” (rather than something like a “three-sided polygon”) was more likely to result in people judging the triangle to be equilateral, since equilateral triangles are more typical and therefore better fit subjects’ mental prototypes. Rickford’s article was quite different, instead focusing on the sociolinguistic study of African American speech. Specifically, Rickford discussed African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, and its significance to both sociolinguistics and the African American community. I would like to focus the remainder of my post to this topic.

I have, in psychology textbooks, read a little of the importance of recognizing cultural aspects such as AAVE. The study that indicates students score better when taking tests written in AAVE rather than in standard English is relatively well known, and it surprises me that nothing largely systemic seems to have been done about it up to this point. I liken this situation to one psychology study, the study of state-dependent memory. In this study, researchers found that subjects who studied underwater (in a scuba suit) statistically performed better on tests when they were underwater. While not a particularly strong analogy, I believe that it serves a nice purpose in linking back to AAVE.

But what of AAVE? This is something that was not a choice. All people have some accent – at the very least, in terribly-drawn geographically-linked lines, an American accent is seen as foreign in England and vice versa. None of these people chose to speak slightly differently from their European/American counterparts, and yet they do. My wonder is how we can accommodate differences in dialect in spaces such as standardized testing given that it seems, at least to me, quite unreasonable for people to have to adapt their manner of speaking to such an important test. That said, I also am curious as to whether there could be a “middle ground” – a dialect that is neither standard English nor AAVE (or other dialect) that could be used to normalize the field.