Doctoral Dissertation Research: Knowledge and processing of morphosyntactic variation

This project examines grammatical variation across two different dialects of American English: Mainstream (or "Standard") American English (MAE) and African American Language (AAL). The project compares speakers of both dialects to participants who speak only MAE, using multiple experimental methods to determine what participants know about the grammatical patterns of each dialect and how they use that knowledge to guide moment-to-moment processing of sentences.

The results will show when and how listeners with different backgrounds successfully accommodate dialect differences, which can inform efforts to mitigate the difficulty of dialect variation in settings such as schools and courtrooms.

This project tests the hypothesis that people know the grammatical rules of dialects they frequently hear, regardless of whether they produce a given dialect. In a sentence rating task, participants listen to examples of Mainstream American English and African American Language, then read a series of sentences and rate how likely a speaker of each dialect would be to say each utterance.

Items vary in their grammaticality in each dialect, including sentences that are grammatical in both dialects, ungrammatical in both dialects, or grammatical in AAL but not MAE. Second, an eye-tracking task tests how participants use the grammatical rules of a given dialect to guide their moment-to-moment interpretation of a sentence. Stronger effects are predicted for bidialectal participants than for monodialectal participants, since bidialectal participants have more knowledge of each dialect and shift their expectations of grammatical form depending on their interlocutor.

This project unites central questions from the fields of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, showing how linguistic experience and social knowledge shape both representations of language in the mind and real-time processing of varying grammatical systems.

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.