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What can we learn about the formation of social identity by studying the way young children learn dialects?
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.
Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development
University of Chicago
Marisa Casillas is interested in exploring how cognitive and social processes shape the ways in which we learn, perceive, and produce language. Her primary research examines the relationship between communicative skills and linguistic processing in children and adults. Casillas uses a...
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
Northwestern University
Annette D'Onofrio is a sociolinguist broadly interested in how phonetic features play into the ways that we understand and create the social world around us. She is particularly interested in how we use social information to understand spoken language, and how we use linguistic styles to form...
Manager
University of Chicago Chatter Lab
Subin Kim joined the Chatter Lab as manager in the summer of 2023 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with majors in Linguistics and Computer Information Science. During her time as an undergraduate student, she worked primarily with Dr. Delphine Dahan to study how individuals...
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Linguistics
University of Chicago
Sharese King's research focuses on the facets and implications of identity construction for African Americans through language, studying how African Americans’ speech is packaged, construed, racialized, and evaluated. She has conducted fieldwork on African American speech in Bakersfield,...
Chair and Professor of Psychology
University of Chicago
Katherine Kinzler’s research sits at the intersection of developmental and social psychology. Her work focuses on the origins of prejudice and ingroup/outgroup thinking, with an emphasis on understanding how language and accent mark social groups. She is also interested in cultural learning,...
Research Assistant
University of Chicago Chatter Lab
Jordyn Martin joined the University of Chicago Chatter Lab as a research assistant in January 2023 after completing a BA in psychology. She is interested in how children use language to form concepts of identity and social belonging.
Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences
Northwestern University
Adriana Weisleder is an assistant professor in the department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University and director of the Child Language Lab. Her research investigates early language development and processing in young children from diverse linguistic and socioeconomic...
