Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language, race, and Identity among ethnically diverse youths in Miami

博士论文研究：迈阿密多民族青年的语言、种族和身份

• 批准号: 1918177
• 负责人: Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
• 金额: $ 1.79万
• 依托单位: Ohio State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-09-01 至 2021-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1918177&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Language; race

The relatively recent migration of Haitians to South Florida has rapidly changed the demographics of Miami Dade County's majority Black neighborhoods. This has caused tensions between the newly arrived Haitian ethnic group and the historically established African Americans. Residents of both ethnicities note that these tensions begin in middle school. This longitudinal study follows a set of new sixth grade students through their first year at a middle school. These participants will need to learn the middle school community's expectations of acceptable racial and ethnic interactions and they will need to join or create social groups that either uphold or abandon these social expectations. As they are adapting to these social expectations, they will be subtly changing their speech to show solidarity with their own social groups and to create social distance from other groups. The life stage of these middle school participants is incredibly important for their own growth into adolescent and adult members of their communities which, in turn, is important for the further development of the societies to which they belong. This work will advance the scientific understanding of how youths learn social expectations and apply that knowledge to their own linguistic behaviors. It will also expand research on language variation by applying previous knowledge to understudied, diverse social groups. This study's broader impacts include publicly available recordings of youth speech, a workshop on language variation and ethnic bullying for teachers and administration in the middle school, and the dissemination of the sociolinguistic knowledge to the general public via press releases. The CoPI, a doctoral student at the Ohio State University, will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in a Miami middle school concentrating the data collection and analysis on a set of 20 to 30 sixth grade students belonging to the same homeroom. This project focuses on the ethnic make-up of the social groups of African and Haitian American students and quantifies the changes in speech that these new students experience as they become enmeshed into the middle school's particular social environment. Two dependent linguistic variables will be analyzed for this project: 3rd person singular verbal-s absence and prosodic rhythm. 3rd person singular verbal-s will be coded as present or absent for each present tense, present reference phrase. A number of factors that influence -s usage, such as verb type and sentence structure, will also be coded. Prosodic rhythm will be measured using a host of established rhythm measures (PVI, %V, ∆C, and varcoC). These two linguistic variables have been shown to vary because of bilingualism and social identity; as a result, this project has two primary independent variables: language background and social network. This project employs a mixed methodological approach that is becoming more common in linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic work. It includes diverse data collection methods: participant observation, audio-recorded linguistic and ethnographic interviews, network analysis, and a language background questionnaire. The data analysis includes both statistical analysis and qualitative coding, which adds depth to the results. The findings of this study will widen the sociolinguistic knowledge of Miami, Black communities, and the US-at-large.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.

海地人向南佛罗里达州的相对较新的移民迅速改变了迈阿密达德县多数黑人社区的人口统计。这引起了新来的海地族群与历史上建立的非裔美国人之间的紧张关系。这两个种族的居民都指出，这些紧张局势始于中学。这项纵向研究是在一组新的六年级学生之后的一年，他们在中学的第一年。这些参与者将需要学习中学社区对可接受的种族和种族互动的期望，他们将需要加入或创建坚持或放弃这些社会期望的社会群体。当他们适应这些社会期望时，他们将巧妙地改变演讲，以表现出与自己的社会群体的声援，并与其他团体建立社会距离。这些中学参与者的生命阶段对于他们自己成年和成年社区成年成员的成长非常重要，这反过来对他们所属的社会的进一步发展至关重要。这项工作将提高人们对年轻人如何学习社会期望并将这些知识应用于自己的语言行为的科学理解。它还将通过将以前的知识应用于研究的，多样化的社会群体来扩大对语言差异的研究。这项研究的更广泛的影响包括对青年演讲的公开录音，关于中学的教师和行政管理的语言变化和种族欺凌的研讨会，以及通过新闻稿向公众传播社会语言知识的。 俄亥俄州立大学的博士生COPI将在迈阿密中学进行民族志实地调查，将数据收集和分析集中在一组20至30个六年级学生的学生上。该项目着重于非洲和海地美国学生社会群体的族裔构成，并量化了这些新学生在中学特定社交环境中所经历的言论变化。将分析该项目的两个依赖性语言变量：第三人称奇异的口头S缺失和韵律节奏。对于每个当前时态，参考短语，第三人称奇异的口头s将被编码为存在或不存在。也将编码许多影响使用动词类型和句子结构的因素。韵律节奏将使用许多已建立的节奏度量（PVI，％V，＆＃8710; C和VARCOC）进行测量。由于双语和社会认同，这两个语言变量已被证明有所不同。结果，该项目有两个主要的自变量：语言背景和社交网络。该项目采用一种混合的方法论方法，在语言人类学和社会语言工作中变得越来越普遍。它包括各种数据收集方法：参与者观察，音频录制的语言和人种学访谈，网络分析以及语言背景问卷。数据分析包括统计分析和定性编码，从而为结果增加了深度。这项研究的结果将扩大迈阿密，黑人社区和一般性的社会语言知识。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子和更广泛影响的评估评估标准的评估值得支持的。