Sunset in the Andes Mountains, Peru
I research how bilinguals process and understand codeswitches in places where the grammars of their languages are different. I look at this in the specific case of adjective and noun word order in Spanish and English. English follows adjective then noun word order (ex. red cat) and Spanish mostly* follows noun then adjective word order (ex. gato rojo).
We know that bilinguals spontaneously produce codeswitches between an adjective and a noun, but a more interesting question is how bilinguals process these codeswitches, especially in comparison to a codeswitch that follows the same word order in both languages, such as a determiner+noun codeswitch (ex. the cat). Check out our preprint that includes a corpus analysis of these codeswitches and investigates how bilinguals rate both adjective/noun codeswitches and determiner+noun codeswitches.
*Spanish has a more flexible word order than English, where some adjectives can go before the noun, some go after noun, and some can go before or after the noun. See my work on evaluating how bilinguals process different types of adjectives in this poster and find all the materials related to this project in the OSF project.
Linguistic and psycholinguistic research can be difficult, as it requires large amounts of funding, time, and manpower to collect, process, and clean speech data. Our goal is to create ES COCO (English-Spanish COde-switching COrpus): the largest open access database of Spanish/English speech data in one repository. We will do this by combining existing text corpora with podcasts in a text format into a user-friendly and searchable database. Check out our work and progress on our GitHub.
This project looked at how the term 'native speaker' is used in language-related research. We found that the term 'native speaker' is vague and harmful, both to the communities we study and to best research practices. In light of these issues, we also provided solutions that avoid the use of 'native speaker'.
I was directly involved in addressing how the term 'native speaker' is detrimental in psycholinguistic research, which resulted in a best practices paper, The Problematic Concept of Native Speaker in Psycholinguistics: Replacing Vague and Harmful Terminology With Inclusive and Accurate Measures.
Problems: 'Native speaker' is ill-defined within and across studies, and is used as a proxy for different aspects of language experience (ex. age of acquisition, usage, proficiency, or membership, to name a few). Using the term 'native speaker' can be harmful, as it carries with it assumptions of language use, ability, acquisition, and identity. When participants are excluded for not fitting the researcher's assumptions of 'nativeness', this can lead to feelings of not speaking any language (i.e., lanuagelessness, Rosa, 2016; Ramjattan, 2019) and perpetuates the idea that these individuals are 'not as good as' so-called 'native speakers' or not 'real speakers' of a language (i.e., deficit models). The term 'native speaker' is also racialized, where people have expectations about who can be a so-called 'native speaker' of a language and those who do not fit the racial expectation are often not considered a 'native speaker' and excluded.
Solutions: We recommend that researchers avoid the use of 'native speaker' altogether, in every stage of research (conceptualization, design, recruitment, surveys, tasks, and data analysis). Instead, we ask researchers to identify what aspect(s) of language experience is important for their research and to recruit participants using those aspects. Ask questions that assess those aspects of language experience, and take into account the sociolinguistic context of your research and participants. In data analysis, use continuous or gradient variables instead of categorical variables. How? See Table 2: Questions which can be used to probe various factors of language experience in survey design of our paper.
This project was developed in the class "Problematizing the Native Speaker in Linguistic Research", taught at the University of Michigan in Fall 2020 by Dr. Savithry Namboodiripad. The class brought together graduate students from linguistics, anthropology, and psychology, and the class created resources for all types of researchers.
For an introduction to the issues associated with the term 'native speaker' and a reading list, see the "Problematizing the Native Speaker" Blogpost.
For psycholinguists and psychologists using language stimuli, see our paper on The Problematic Concept of Native Speaker in Psycholinguistics: Replacing Vague and Harmful Terminology With Inclusive and Accurate Measures.
For the history of the term 'native speaker' and how to away from it in the field of linguistics, see the pre-print Towards a Linguistics Free of "Native Speakerhood".
For more resources and to join others in moving away from essentialist ideology such as 'native speaker', check out the ROLE Collective: a group working towards policy change to remove harmful ideologies about language in academia and beyond.