Class and Categories: What Role Does Socioeconomic Status Play in Children\u27s Lexical and Conceptual Development?

At one time, academic inquiries into the relationship between socioeconomic class and language acquisition were commonplace, but the past 20 years have seen a decrease in work that focuses on the intersection between class and early language learning. Recently, however, against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the United States (which has been criticized as a culturally biased education policy that, through highstakes testing and broad-based, uniform curricula, discounts the value of non-standard home language varieties largely spoken by working-class children), there has been renewed interest in the relationship between class, language use, and the assessment of academic achievement in the field of education. Despite the inroads that have been made over the past 40 years by linguists in establishing the contrary, recent educational and language policies have served to reignite the difference vs. deficit debate largely attributed to the early work of both Basil Bernstein and William Labov. Unfortunately, much of the language acquisition work upon which policymakers are relying is founded on outdated information and misrepresentations of the varieties under consideration (African American English in particular); and still the scholastic performance of these children is measured according to class-based rubrics. In order to address the lacuna in the field, in this study, working- and middle-class adults and children aged two through six were shown a series of pictures including ‘normal’ referents (e.g., a cat), and unfamiliar combinations (e.g., a clock with wheels), which they were asked to identify. There were both age and class dependent differences in terms of naming behaviors (e.g., the number of words and morphemes and linguistic construction types). The older and middle-class participants used more sophisticated linguistic strategies (such as descriptive phrases) than the younger participants, and the working-class children showed a greater reluctance to engage in naming strategies beyond one- word overextensions. These disparities suggested that the participants not only employed different strategies by age, but that there was also a classlinked difference in their understanding of the task. When these results are interpreted in light of the deficit/difference debate, it is clear that linguists and educators continue to face the same issue: non-standard varieties are linguistically adequate, but there remains a societal insistence on furthering the primacy of middle-class linguistic structures and language behaviors which serves to maintain a cycle of educational failure for working-class children

The Minstrel Legacy: African American English and the Historical Construction of Black Identities in Entertainment

Linguists have long been aware that the language scripted for ethnic roles in the media has been manipulated for a variety of purposes ranging from the construction of character authenticity to flagrant ridicule. This paper provides a brief overview of the history of African American roles in the entertainment industry from minstrel shows to present-day films. I am particularly interested in looking at the practice of distorting African American English as an historical artifact which is commonplace in the entertainment industry today. Dialogue which is clearly meant as an imitation of African American English still results in the construction of an ethnic stereotype that serves as a reflection of European American attitudes regarding African Americans. As a result, such depictions provide non-Black acculturated people with a perception of Blackness that is founded in inaccuracies and derision but has been portrayed as authentic, leaving Black life open to continual mimicry

The Dirty Third: Contributions of Southern Hip Hop to the Study of Regional Variation Within African American English

While there is well documented evidence of certain supra-regional features in African American English (AAE) phonology and morphosyntax (for example, see Labov 1972; Rickford 1999; Baugh 2000; Green 2002), recent trends in the study of linguistic variation suggest that the homogeneity of the variety has been largely overstated (Mallinson & Wolfram 2002; Friedland 2003; Wolfram 2003). For the most part, contemporary AAE influences on mainstream language have originated from varieties spoken in the northeast and on the west coast which have evolved independently of one another over the past forty years, and which vary in significant ways from southern AAE; however, the most popular linguistic styles of rap music and hip hop culture have shifted over the years as artists from various regions (the West Coast, the Midwest, and the South) have put their particular speech communities on the map in the Black Public Sphere. We argue here that as southern American rappers have become more dominant in the popular music scene, like East and West coast rappers before them, they have had a significant impact on the AAE spoken by hip hop’s insiders, and they have also influenced the language of mainstream speakers as well. This paper builds on Smitherman’s insights on Hip Hop Linguistics (2006) even as it explores a more recent sociolinguistic phenomenon: the imminent emergence of southern AAE forms in the music and lyrics of the most popular rap artists of this decade and the attendant influence that these forms might have on AAE in general. Preliminary findings suggest that the linguistic effects of southern rap on AAE (and to a lesser extent, mainstream varieties) are not only evident in the lexicon (which could be dismissed simply as fleeting slang), but also in the phonology of the variety, providing us with a more complete understanding of contemporary AAE and the ways in which the variety continues to develop

Jennifer Collins Bloomquist, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Dean of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Programs

In this first Next Page column of the new academic year, Jennifer Collins Bloomquist, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Dean of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Programs, shares what she would ask Zora Neale Hurston if she had the chance, which food-related books she likes to give as gifts, why she can’t have anything fun to read at her house when she has a deadline looming, and her go-to campus sources for great recommendations on what to read next

Lying, Cheating, and Stealing: A Study of Categorical Misdeeds

The goal of this paper is to provide evidence that lie, steal, and cheat are the only concepts that share membership in a specialized semantic category which has a specific set of prototypical features that separates them from other kinds of misdeeds. Findings show that lie, cheat, and steal can be reduced to similar weighted semantic features and that in testing the relevance of these primitives, we find experimental results that reveal that lie, cheat, and steal have parallel prototype effects establishing the same kinds of gradient membership in all three concepts. It is this scalar membership that leads to the mismatch between speakers’ definitions of the concepts and their application of the categories to actual examples of lying, cheating, and stealing. The second purpose of this study is the development of category models that take into account the gradient membership and the variability of concept use as well as culturally inspired ideas about what lying, cheating, and stealing entail. The ultimate goal of this project is to discover the greater implications category structures by constructing a mega-model that only includes the concepts lying, cheating, and stealing and accounts for their exclusive membership in a larger concept field

Developmental Trends in Semantic Acquisition: Evidence from Over-Extensions in Child Language

Children aged 2 through 6 years and adults were shown a series of pictures including \u27normal\u27 referents (e.g., cat or car), and unfamiliar combination tokens (e.g., a clock with a telephone handset), which they were asked to identify. There were age-dependent differences in terms of naming (i.e., the number of words and morphemes and linguistic constructions) and criteria for category membership. The older participants used more morphemes and sophisticated linguistic strategies (e.g., descriptive phrases) than the younger participants, and the younger children showed a greater tendency to rely on holistic shape as a category determiner. These disparities suggested that the participants not only employed different strategies by age, but that they also had different criteria for categorization

People say I speak proper, but girl, I’m ghetto! Regional Dialect Use and Adaptation by African American Women in Pennsylvania’s Lower Susquehanna Valley

African American Women’s Language: Discourse, Education, and Identity is a groundbreaking collection of research on African American Women’s Language that is long overdue. It brings together a range of research including variationist, autoethnography, phenomenological, ethnographic, and critical. The authors come from a variety of disciplines (e.g., Sociology, African American Studies, Africana Studies, Linguistics, Sociophonetics, Sociolinguistics, Anthropology, Literacy, Education, English, Ecological Literature, Film, Hip Hop, Language Variation), scientific paradigms (e.g., critical race theory, narrative, interaction, discursive, variationist, post-structural, and post-positive perspectives), and inquiry methods (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic, and multimethod) while addressing a variety of African American female populations (e.g., elementary school, middle school, adults) and activity settings (e.g., classrooms, family, community, church, film). Readers will get a good sense of the language, discourse, identity, community, and grammar of African American women. The essays provide the most current research on African American Women’s Language and expand a literature that has too often only focused on male populations at the expense of letting the sistas speak

Dialect Differences in Central Pennsylvania: A Socio-Historical Account of Regional Dialect Use and Adaptation by African American Speakers in the Lower Susquehanna Valley

This study examines the sociohistorical acquisition and non acquisition of the regional dialect by African Americans who are at least second-generation residents (i.e., natives) of Pennsylvania\u27s Lower Susquehanna Valley (including Harrisburg, York, and Lancaster). The linguistic factors that are considered are region-specific elements of lexicon and syntax; social and historical factors involve the migrant African Americans\u27 relationships to the European American community including physical location (rural vs. urban, integrated vs. segregated), socioeconomic status, rates and types of contact among speakers, and the connections maintained by the relocated members to their home communities. Findings show that European Americans still use substantially more of the local expressions, and that the region\u27s rural African Americans are no more likely to integrate the local lexicon into their everyday usage than the African Americans who reside in the area\u27s urban centers. Despite the fact that urban Lower Susquehanna Valley African Americans are often closely connected to larger African American communities and have decreased rates of contact with non--African Americans, they also show evidence of familiarity with and usage of the local lexicon and report more usage of regional syntactic patterns (e.g., the car needs washed) than do the rural African American participants

Analyzing Characteristics of Experts in the Context of Stoichiometric Problem-Solving

To gauge the variability in expert problem-solving strategies for stoichiometry problems, a set of experts in different career tracks were studied with the cohort including 17 graduate students in chemistry, three college chemistry instructors, and seven college graduates working in the industry. The goal of the study was to determine whether variability would be observed based upon experience and career trajectories. The data were collected using interviews and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using the COSINE (Coding System for Investigating Sub-problems and Network) method. Although the method was developed for the analysis of undergraduate problem-solving, it appeared to be effective in examining experts’ problem-solving in chemistry as well. The study revealed similar abilities for succeeding at solving a series of problems, but the strategies were variable for the three cohorts of experts. Specifically, the amount of information used to solve the problems differed across the three cohorts with graduate students focusing more upon each of the specific subproblems within each problem compared to industry chemists utilizing the big-picture approach in lieu of breaking down each problem into respective subproblems. Familiarity with the question types and ability to chunk information were common characteristics observed consistently for the expert participants, which is consistent with existing research