Marisa Casillas
Research Project
Roots of Linguistic Identity
Project Team:
2022 – 2025
Photo by RawPixel via Adobe Stock.
Key Question
What can we learn about the formation of social identity by studying the way young children learn dialects?
Project Summary
This interdisciplinary research team aims to integrate the methods of developmental psychology and sociolinguistics so as to better understand the intersection of language-acquisition and the earliest developments of social identity. The novel approach will focus on the learning of dialects by infants and young children.
When children learn language, they learn more than sounds, words, and syntax: they learn how language can be used as a tool for constructing and performing social identities, for relating to others, and for otherwise communicating meaning beyond the literal. And yet, research on early child language learning has traditionally, and markedly, isolated itself from considerations of children’s simultaneous social and cultural development. This interdisciplinary team of developmental psychologists, linguists, and comparative developmentalists seeks to move past this artificial separation. The project brings together methods and theory from developmental psychology and sociolinguistics to examine language at its earliest intersection with social identity: the detection and learning of dialects by infants and young children. This high-risk project leans on the incredible dialect variation across Chicagoland communities to develop and road-test a cross-linguistic and cross-culturally applicable research method for testing children's early sound, word, and social knowledge of different dialects, including an artificial dialect designed to target specific aspects of the learning process. Given the novelty and potential impact of the proposed method, even partial success would make a substantial contribution to our currently limited insight into the very beginnings of children’s knowledge about social variation in language, both generally and with respect to Chicago dialects specifically.
Research Team
Reading List
Kinzler, Katherine
How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do and What It Says About You Mariner Books, 2020 ReadD'Onofrio, Annette and Benheim, Jaime
Contextualizing Reversal: Local Dynamics of the Northern Cities Shift in a Chicago Community Journal of Sociolinguistics 24 (4), 469–491 ReadD'Onofrio, Annette and King, Sharese
Distinction Without Distance: Racialized Vocalic Differences in an Integrated Chicago Community American Speech (April 2022) ReadKing, Sharese
From African American Vernacular English to African American Language: Rethinking the Study of Race and Language in African Americans’ Speech Annual Review of Linguistics 2020 (6), 285–300 ReadCasey, Kennedy and Casillas, Marisa
From Doggy to Dog: Developmental Shifts in Children’s Use of Register-Specific Words Proceedings of the 44th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2022) ReadExplore
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