People who use the same language never use it precisely the same way. Languages vary from region to region, community to community, even person to person, and English is no exception. It’s not just your pronunciation that differs depending on where you’re from and who you grew up around, either. People from different communities also use different sentence structures.
Would you say that your car needs washing, or that it needs washed? That you might be able to go, or that you might could go? That you don’t want anything right now or that you don’t want nothing?
In conversation, differences like these occasionally get in the way of understanding what someone means, but often they pass unnoticed. The fact that we often understand each other despite these differences tells us that language abilities are highly adaptable, and studying that adaptability can help reveal how language works in the mind and in society.
Assistant professor Cynthia Lukyanenko and Linguistics PhD student Brittany Lee-Bey are exploring how people who speak different varieties of English understand each other—starting right next door in Anacostia. To do so, they’re inviting community members who grew up in Southeast DC or neighboring regions of Prince George’s County to participate in a study that looks at how people understand sentences they would or would not say themselves. Data collection kicked off in December and is expected to continue through the spring and summer.
The study is part of a larger collaborative effort funded by the National Science Foundation. With additional locations in East Tennessee and at Penn State, the study will compare people’s eye-movements while they read sentences that are more common in their region or in one of the others. Researchers will look to see which sentences and patterns make participants more likely to pause or backtrack—indications that they’re having difficulty making sense of what they’re reading—and which ones don’t.
Will Washingtonians slow down when they read patterns that are more common in Appalachia? Will Penn Staters backtrack when they encounter sentences more common in Anacostia? Further studies will explore what people in all three locations expect speakers from their own or the other communities to say. Together, these studies will help us understand the kind of knowledge and abilities people who speak differently use understand each other anyway.
Interested in participating? Curious about student research opportunities? Email the lab at palm@gmu.edu
January 24, 2025