PostDoctoral Research Fellowship

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This Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Postdoctoral Research and Training Fellowship focuses on how social factors such as teacher bias and institutional racism affect minority children's academic development. . Eminent scientists in linguistics, speech, cognitive-developmental psychology, and education at Haskins Laboratories, the sponsoring institution, will mentor and instruct the Fellow in areas in which she lacks expertise, including quantitative analyses and cognitive bases of reading. The sponsoring scientist, Hollis Scarborough, is a cognitive-developmental psychologist with extensive experience in conducting research on the development of oral and written language skills, including the relationship of dialect differences to early reading achievement. Sociolinguists have clearly demonstrated not only that our speech reveals much about ethnic and geographic origins, but also that listeners reliably attribute racially stereotyped traits to speakers based on perceptions of dialect, particularly African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). AAVE speakers are consistently judged, by listeners of all races, to be less intelligent and less educated than speakers of so-called "standard" American English (SAE). Although the social and occupational consequences of such stigmatization have received much attention, the educational ramifications of dialect differences have been infrequently studied. Yet these might be crucial factors in explaining the longstanding and persistent racial "achievement gaps" in reading and other academic areas among America's schoolchildren. Elementary school teachers will be asked to make judgments about speaker characteristics after listening to brief speech samples from young children who vary widely in their use of particular AAVE features and overall density of those features. In addition to the morphosyntactic and phonological forms that have been the focus of much sociolinguistic analysis, AAVE intonation patterns will also be examined because they too may be stigmatized. Judgments will be made by teachers who differ in social background, race, age, region, and teaching experience with African- American children. By administering the procedure both online and in person, it will be possible to recruit a large and diverse sample of teacher-judges. Opportunities will also be provided for teachers to provide comments and questions about the child speakers, so that qualitative analyses can also be performed to aid the interpretation of quantitative findings. The results will reveal whether teachers judge students more negatively, and if so, along what dimensions, when particular kinds of AAVE features are present or when there is a high density of multiple features in the child's speech. This will permit a determination of the relative salience and stigmatization of particular aspects of AAVE, which may vary across teachers depending on their experience, race, or region. Gaining this understanding of how teachers perceive and interpret dialect differences will not only be theoretically informative but will also serve as a guide to designing professional development programs to increase teachers' knowledge and acceptance of AAVE. This research will also contribute to the sociolinguistic literature on how notions of the standard language are formed within a speech community. The language standard used in schools is closely related to the sociolinguistic concepts of hypercorrection and social norms in the speech community. Thus, it is crucial to determine the role that educational institutions play in the construction of communicative competence and social mobility. Despite the fact that African-Americans are disproportionately represented among struggling readers, there are few minority researchers studying this achievement gap in a manner that combines theoretical and methodological approaches drawn from linguistics, speech, cognitive-developmental psychology, and education.