A meeting of the minds: Broadening horizons in the study of linguistic discrimination and social justice through sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches

Abstract

1 Understanding social justice as it relates to linguistic discrimination and identity requires consideration of both production and perception. As linguists and cognitive psychologists become more attuned to talking about social justice, the need to discuss linguistic human behaviors through a sociocognitive lens becomes more pertinent than ever. This article offers a sociocognitive approach to linguistic analysis as a means to combat linguistic discrimination in the pursuit of social justice. Having negative ideologies about a particular group of people, especially a minoritized group, influences linguistic prediction and perceptions. Together, sociolinguistic and psychological methodologies are necessary to navigate a world in which people use linguistic knowledge to make decisions and predictions about their interlocutors. I use sociocognitive approaches as vehicles for social justice, centering African American English and Anti-Black Racism. The limited existing sociocognitive linguistic research indicates that listeners may modulate their linguistic expectations during cognitive processing based on speaker identity and stereotypes of speakers. As linguistic discrimination is ever-present in U.S. society, in addition to describing sociocognitive solutions, this article also represents a call to action for researchers to empirically test ideological claims about linguistic varieties that are passively accepted, strengthen replicability, and broaden approaches to the study of minoritized varieties more generally. Hopefully, this article will inspire linguistics researchers to consider all factors, cognitive and social, related to linguistic perception, further contributing to a greater understanding of how to combat linguistic discrimination from a multidimensional frame.

Trabajar los ODS en el aula de personas adultas mediante textos memorialísticos: género, interculturalidad y multimodalidad

“…percepción del taller). Finalmente, 4 personas participaron en una entrevista semi-estructurada (Kvale, 2011), a partir de la cual se ha podido reflexionar sobre la aportación de un trabajo lingüístico multimodal al desarrollo del concepto de justicia social (Fraser, 1996;Weissler, 2022) y a la profundización en los ODS. Se perseguía un cambio de percepción respecto lo que implica el aprendizaje de una lengua adicional en el siglo XXI, que va más allá del aprendizaje gramatical y de vocabulario (Vaisman y Kahn-Horwitz, 2019), para centrarse en la multimodalidad y el desarrollo de la multiliteracidad (Kucer, 2014;Serafini, 2014;Paesani et al, 2015;Warner y Dupuy, 2018; Reyes-Torres y Portalés-Raga, 2020; Lacorte y Reyes-Torres, 2021).…”

“…Percepción del taller (8 preguntas de escala Likert). Finalmente, 4 estudiantes han participado en una entrevista semi-estructurada (Kvale, 2011), mediante la cual se ha podido reflexionar sobre la aportación de un trabajo lingüístico multimodal al desarrollo del concepto de justicia social (Fraser, 1996;Weissler, 2022), a la difusión y profundización de los ODS seleccionados y a la mediación plurilingüe e intercultural. El contexto geográfico y sociolingüístico del CFPA, así como la tipología de las personas participantes en los talleres de literatura memorialística justifican los criterios de selección de los textos elegidos.…”

Examining linguistic and experimenter biases through “non-native” versus “native” speech

“…The issue at hand is not fundamentally about terminology but more centrally about the biases brought to bear in the research setting, and how we can use the existing dichotomies to our advantage in psycholinguistic research specifically. We know that the discerning nature of humans can lead to discrimination and bias (Weissler, 2022), and therefore, there needs to be dedicated consideration by the psycholinguistics community, and by people more broadly, about the powerful influence of ideology in every facet of our lives, including in how we design our scientific experiments.…”

Hurdles and horizons of linguistics for social justice

“…Linguistic oppression has resulted from atrocious language and educational policies imposed by the dominant class, for example, by punishing pupils who speak minority languages on school grounds (Jaspers & Rosiers 2022), or by removing indigenous children from their communities and placing them in English-only residential schools (such as in Canada, Grant 1996; and in Australia, Read 1999/2020). Others have looked at how language may be used as a proxy to class, gender, and racial inequalities (Block 2015), and how characteristics of the linguistic variety one speaks could become a basis for linguistic discrimination (Holborow 1999; Henry 2010; Lippi-Green 2011; Weissler 2022).…”