My first impression of Lupyan’s paper on the typicality of mental representations of the word “triangle" and Rickford’s paper on sociolinguists’ relationships with communities which speak African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) was that while both readings were quite fascinating, they had virtually nothing in common with each other. However, upon further thought, I started wondering about a potential connection between the two subjects: the social implications of mental representations.
Just as Lupyan notes that people typically imagine triangles as equilateral or isosceles, I posit that people (at least in American society) usually have a very specific mental representation of the word “human”: namely, a middle-aged, white, straight, cisgender male. Of course, we each recognize that people of other genders and ethnicities are human, just as we can abstract the triangle to a three-sided polygon whose angles add up to 180 degrees. However, when people are given no linguistic or contextual markers of gender, ethnicity, or other attributes in the description of a person, they seem to default to the prototypical image of a man. This phenomenon is something I myself am certainly guilty of – when I think “human,” I immediately think of the stereotypical illustration of evolution, which starts with a small ape and ends with – you guessed it – a white man. Additionally, when reading these very papers on linguistics, I default to imagining the author as male, catching myself only when I realize I’ve been using he/him pronouns without justification. Unlike our mental representations of a triangle, though, our mental representations of the “ideal” or “typical” human carry significantly more social weight: they serve to separate the “normal” from the “other."
Rickford argues that linguists should engage more with the AAVE-speaking community (whether by working with employers to revise their negative perceptions of AAVE speakers or by encouraging children in elementary school to participate in reading programs); I similarly wonder whether it is the duty of linguists to educate people by making them aware of their unnoticed biases when mentally representing words. What would be the result of this education? Is it possible to entirely abstract the concept of a human, and would this be desirable? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue.
Do you think that bias holds true for people in all cultures trying to visualize a human? Namely non-Western Cultures. Furthermore, why wouldn't it be the duty of the linguist to stress the applications of their work in the environment of their subjects? Don't other scientists who find break through medicine then try to make their findings available and applicable to the public? How is this different?
ReplyDeleteI was really intrigued by your blogpost! It was very thought provoking and made me realize I too have unnoticed biases. How do you think one could go about overcoming these almost instinctive biases? Is it even possible?
ReplyDeleteHi Caroline, I think you bring a very good point about our perceived presumptions of the physical representation of a word. I would claim that this starts since an early age, as we learn to associate new vocabulary with images. I think it is interesting how teaching pneumonic devices affect our representation of the word. An example that comes to my mind is how immediate we picture an apple to be red, when in reality colors have a rich variety of colors. Yet, because when an apple is pictured, it is always red, we immediately draw to that conclusion.
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