Doctoral Dissertation Research: Processing garden paths across dialects: A study of African American English

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

The United States is home to a large multi-cultural and multi-lingual population. Many speakers interact with different languages and different varieties of English daily. A lot of research has been devoted to understanding how speakers of multiple languages, multilinguals, use their knowledge of multiple languages to interpret language in context. But less is known about how speakers who know different varieties of a single language ('dialects') accomplish this. In this dissertation project, the researchers investigate African American Language (AAL), a variety of English spoken primarily, but not exclusively, by African Americans. The research investigates how speakers of AAL understand sentences that use linguistic features that are present in AAL but not present in Mainstream American English (MAE), the 'standard' dialect spoken across the US. AAL and MAE overlap significantly, but there are specific grammatical constructions where the two diverge. This project investigates when and how AAL speakers use these dialect-specific constructions in different contexts. Research into how AAL speakers use context to do this will shed light onto how language processing proceeds in more naturalistic contexts, and will also shed light into the usage of a variety of English spoken by a significant portion of the United States' population. The comprehension of ambiguous sentences has been a central component of psycholinguistic research for many decades. The classic demonstration of this is the 'garden path effect', the finding that comprehenders encounter processing difficulty when ambiguous sentences are disambiguated towards an unlikely syntactic structure. This happens because comprehenders make active predictions about what syntactic continuations are likely as they process linguistic input, with difficulty occurring when those predictions turn out to be incorrect. The predictions comprehenders make can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as word frequency, plausibility, grammatical knowledge, and even social features of the speaker. The current study uses garden path effects as a window into what syntactic expectations AAL speakers have during language processing. Specifically, this project employs visual-world eye-tracking to investigate how these speakers use factors such as speaker voice and the presence of other dialect-specific grammatical features to adjust their predictions about how a sentence is structured. The specific structure to be investigated is the phenomenon of contact subject relative clauses. In AAL, it is possible to have sentence such as "Sally is the one (who) sent a letter to her mom" where the "who" is optional. In MAE, in contrast, "who" is required. By investigating whether AAL speakers interpret Sally as the sender of the letter or receiver of the letter in a sentence like this, the researchers will be able to measure how much speakers anticipate this construction in different contexts. This research will help add to growing literature on how contextual factors (e.g., speaker voice) influence on-going linguistic processing as well as adding critical diversity to the psycholinguistic literature. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.