Today I took the hike to UNC-Chapel Hill to meet with linguistics professor Dr. Michael Terry. After parking off of Franklin St and successfully navigating my way to the Smith Building (truly a feat for someone as directionally challenged as I am), Dr. Terry and I sat down to talk about our respective interests in linguistics. Dr. Terry was a mechanical engineering graduate student when he took his first linguistics course, which sparked a new interest which led to his pursuing his Ph.D. It’s really cool to hear from people who arrived at their linguistic curiosity in ways much different than I did.
A specific field within linguistics that I am interested in is language acquisition, both of a first language and foreign ones. While this is not Dr. Terry’s concentration (he works primarily with semantics), he had some really interesting insight for me into how this process really works. Dr. Terry explained to me that in any language, sounds are grouped into mental categories that often fly unnoticed for native speakers. For example, the p sound in “Paul” and “stop” are actually two distinct sounds, but English speakers categorize them together making them nearly indistinguishable from one another. However, these same two sounds are completely and identifiably separate for Hindi speakers, just as how p and b are totally different sounds for English speakers. This is why its often difficult to drop an accent when learning a foreign language; the acquisition of a second language requires you to identify and reclassify sounds that are not intuitively different. However, despite the distinction between these two sounds being lost on adult speakers, babies as old as 8 months have been seen in studies to be able to identify the distinction between the sounds before they are verbal, opening up more questions about how much of language is genetic or learned.
Dr. Terry also introduced me to one of his ongoing research projects about the impact of dialect differences between Standard Classroom English (SCE) and African American English (AAE) on 2nd graders in testing. The specific syntactical difference tested was the marking of the third person singular, i.e. she bakes. The addition of that –s at the end of the verb is present in SCE but not in AAE, and this small letter has a surprisingly significant impact on AAE-speaking children. In fact, when Dr. Terry and his team designed math word problems that conformed to the descriptive grammar of AAE, students performed up to 10% better– a whole letter grade. This finding leads to bigger questions about misdiagnosing attention issues or math deficiencies in young students due to a factor that is completely unrelated to their ability to do math. This research was a really cool example of the scientific aspect of linguistics that makes it particularly interesting to me.
Dr. Terry lent me his copy of Patterns in the Mind by Ray Jackendoff (one of the first linguistics books he read), which I am really looking forward to reading before I meet with him again next week. Go Heels, Go Linguistics!
