Mechanisms underlying the impact of dialect mismatch on spoken language comprehension

项目总结/文摘

Project Summary/Abstract Spoken language comprehension requires the integration of linguistic information with communicative intent and sociocultural information (speaker identity). This process usually unfolds with relative ease but can be disrupted by variability in the speech signal (e.g., background noise) and sociocultural differences (e.g., speaker race). It is these kinds of disruptions that characterize the challenges faced by students who speak African American English (AAE) at home, but have to comprehend General American English (GAE) at school. Students who speak AAE at home experience dialect mismatch, the presence of linguistic differences between AAE and the dialect of instruction, which is almost always GAE. Dialect mismatch has been shown to negatively impact spoken language comprehension, but the mechanisms that underlie this relationship remain unclear. These consequences have been traditionally explained in terms of signal degradation, in which perceptual analysis is more difficult (perceptual costs hypothesis). However, spoken language comprehension is more than perceptual analysis. An alternative explanation, the epistemic trust hypothesis posits that the effects of dialect mismatch on spoken language comprehension also arise from sociocultural differences between conversational partners. The primary objective of this research is to evaluate the validity of the epistemic trust hypothesis. Using the visual world paradigm, the effects of dialect mismatch and group membership on the comprehension of literal and intending meaning will be evaluated in 7- to 9-year-old children learning AAE or GAE. To evaluate the effects of dialect mismatch on spoken language comprehension, children will hear sentences in a familiar and unfamiliar dialect of English. To evaluate the role of epistemic trust, sentences will be paired with visual images of speakers of different races to convey in-group or out-group membership. Aim 1 examines the effect of dialect and group membership on semantic prediction. Aim 2 examines the effect of dialect and group membership on children’s pragmatic inferencing skills, specifically, scalar implicatures. Collectively, these two studies innovatively respond to the question of how dialect mismatch impacts spoken language comprehension. Traditional explanations focus on perceptual costs, which has resulted in the development of dialect-shifting curricula. However, spoken language comprehension is more than perceptual analysis and requires integration of speaker intent, which may be harder to do when there are both dialect and sociocultural differences. The studies proposed directly test the validity of the epistemic trust hypothesis. If this hypothesis is supported, then this would suggest that curricula that also consider epistemic trust may be better suited to address educational consequences associated with dialect mismatch.