Rachel Weissler successfully defended her dissertation back on June 16th and I was prompted to update this news post because the paperwork is now signed and sealed. Details and the abstract are below. She has already begun the next chapter of her career as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon.
Title: Leveraging African American English Knowledge: Cognition and Multidialectal Processing
Committee: Robin Queen (co-chair), Jonathan Brennan (co-chair), Julie Boland, & Lisa Green
Abstract:
This dissertation uses theories and methodologies from sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics,
and psycholinguistics to investigate how American English-speaking listeners cognitively
interact with voices from Black and White individuals. For so long, social and cognitive
subfields in linguistics have been pursued independently. Sociolinguistics in particular not only
provides the opportunity to look at grammar at all levels (phonetic, semantic, and syntactic) but
also focuses on where language comes from; living, breathing, diverse individuals.
Sociolinguistic methods span a variety of modes that provide fine-grained nuance into
communities, variation, and change. However, the majority of sociolinguistic methods are
offline, and this can be limiting when considering not only how language exists within
individuals and interpersonally, but how language is processed in real time. The field of
psycholinguistics provides a range of online processing methods and theories that can show us
what speakers and listeners do with language in real time. However, psycholinguistic methods
and experimental frames have historically looked at standard or colonizing languages, rather than
minoritized ones. This limited focus is a larger issue for the field of linguistics. Thus, looking at
minoritized language varieties is paramount to broaden and refine our knowledge of how human
language is processed.
In this dissertation, I investigate how different parts of grammar modulate variation in
perception from a sociolinguistic frame of reference. The data presented come from over 90
sociolinguistic interviews, four online surveys, a virtual eye-tracking study, and two EEG
neurolinguistic experiments. In Chapter 2, I investigate the relationship between perception of
race and perception of emotion by operationalizing the Angry Black Woman Trope through a
survey including stimuli from one Black AAE speaking woman and from one White SdAE
speaking woman. Results showed that the Black voice was most correctly identified racially in
the Angry and Neutral conditions, while the white voice was correctly identified in the Happy
condition. However, low base rate correctness overall in race identification did not coincide with
free-write responses from participants, indicating their perception of “lax” voices sounding Black
and “enunciated” voices sounding White.
This disagreement between the audio identification and the free-write responses form the
impetus for Chapter 3, in which virtual eye-tracking was incorporated to better understand
listener’s implicit perceptions of emotional speech from AAE-speaking and SdAE-speaking women. Participant experiential linguistic knowledge was measured through exposure and
familiarity surveys, and usage through virtual sociolinguistic interviews. It was hypothesized
that listeners with higher experiential linguistic knowledge of AAE would show less bias,
determined by identifying emotional speech with emotional and racialized image stimuli
correctly, as recorded through the virtual eye-tracker. The results from this study indicate that
participants have a broad range of experiential linguistic knowledge with AAE, and trends in the
data suggest that higher experience can predict less bias.
Chapter 3 shows the benefit of using implicit processing models to probe cognition and
variation. Chapter 4 extends the findings of emotional prosody perception to syntactic prediction
during processing within the same multidialectal frame. Two electroencephalography (EEG)
experiments focus on syntactic variation between AAE and SdAE, probing how listener
expectations look when American listeners process these two varieties of English. Results show
that AAE and SdAE are processed differently with respect to grammatical content, and lack of
content, in the auxiliary position. This research, like in Chapters 2 and 3, speaks to the concept of
working within a multidialectal frame during linguistic processing and in the world in general.
Through analysis of these two American Englishes, this dissertation contributes to further
understanding how social information interfaces with online processing, and expectations that
may be formed depending on the perceived identity of a voice. This dissertation contributes to a
greater understanding about cognition within multidialectal processing.