The Lupyan article “The Paradoxes of the Universal Triangle” speaks to how language affects our mental representations or our “goal states”. Lupyan looks into how people symbolically represent the triangle in their minds through a variety of tasks: drawing, recognition, visual judgement, inference. He finds that visualization of triangles are graded, context dependent, and represented as “idealized perceptual states” or “prototypes”. This suggests that our mental representations are flexible and change depending on the words used to evoke the mental representation.

The Rickford poignant article “Unequal Partnership” discussed how linguists tend to study communities for data but hardly ever give back in meaningful ways. To Rickford, meaningful service means to empower and advocate for the community you collect data from. And before you even get to the community you should do your homework and learn about the community’s culture, so as to not fall into the trap of making stereotypical judgements about the community. Rickford focuses on the African American community specifically, saying that linguists act like vultures, learning all they can about AAVE without giving back. I think this can happen in any field that uses human subjects. For instance, as a Human-Computer Interaction researcher, I often seek people to try and give me feedback on various products. However, I hardly ever follow up with them or work to better serve their community as a whole.

I thought that it would be interesting to look about the concept of mental representations and AAVE together, so the intersection between Lupyan’s and Rickford’s work. The burning questions I had after reading these two articles back-to-back were: Is there something unique about mental representations that allows that children who speak AAVE to read better after using a dialect reader? How would native AAVE speakers fare in Lupyan’s triangle tests in comparison to native Standard English (SE) speakers? Right now in a philosophy class I’m taking, we are learning about mental states and possible philosophical theories for how we can describe what mental states are ‘about’. I hypothesize that the mental states of AAVE sentences for AAVE speakers are more memorable or easier to access than mental states of English sentences. One interesting study would be to have two pools of subjects: those who speak AAVE and those who speak SE. We could compare their depictions of words given in AAVE vs. SE given similar framework as the Lupyan study. I am interested to know more about the connection between linguistics, dialects, and mental representations.