LEAP workshop

Our second LEAP meeting of Autumn Quarter will take place this Friday, 08 November at 11 am in Saieh Hall For Economics 141 and on Zoom. Jordyn Martin (PhD student, Linguistics, UChicago) will be presenting.

• Title: Restoring the “social” and “cultural” in language development research

• Abstract: Early child language research has largely separated the acquisition of linguistic forms from children’s social and cultural development. This is done despite the established facts in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that: (1) language is inherently a social process and (2) language and culture are intimately connected. In this presentation, I will discuss an on-going analysis of dialect variation that aims to elucidate the socialization processes at the intersection of language and identity formation. Specifically, we aim to understand the formation of social identity by studying the ways in which young children learn dialects. I will present on 26 sociolinguistic interviews conducted with Chicago-based caregivers of Black children. Interviews reveal connections between caregiver language ideology, informed by outside perceptions of the self and child, and language development. Caregivers display awareness of the ways in which language indexes social identity in a possibly essentialist frame, which informs views of dialect variation and, in turn, home language pedagogy. Two open questions remain: (1) within our dataset, what is the extent of variation in dialect views and language socialization strategies, and (2) outside of our dataset, how are these socialization patterns and language ideologies reflected in child language use? This project is in progress and we welcome any critiques, advice, or insights you may have.