Past events: Ethan Kutlu. Can you meet me halfway? Speech perception in linguistically diverse communities

What: Can you meet me halfway? Speech perception in linguistically diverse communities.

Where: BCBL Zoom Room # 2 (online talk) (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Ethan Kutlu, PhD, Linguistics, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa, US

When:  Thursday, Mar 14th at 14:00 h.

For a very long time, bi/multilingualism was seen as a binary experience. A language user was thought of as either a monolingual—someone exposed to only one language—or a bi/multilingual—someone exposed to more than one language. The consensus was to use monolinguals as the baseline to explore bi/multilingualism. We now know that such approaches are neither useful nor inclusive, as bi/multilingualism is not a one-size-fits-all experience. Furthermore, these approaches are not enough to explain other variations in language use (e.g., bidialectalism, accents, etc.). Importantly, it becomes more and more challenging to find so-called “true” bilinguals or monolinguals in the global world, and using these categorical options leads to more errors in interpreting our findings. In this talk, I will focus on linguistic diversity, a term that captures language variation at every level (i.e., dialect, accent, and bi/multilingual experiences), and move away from categorical descriptions of language use. To do so, I will show data from ecological perspectives in which language users’ immediate social network is considered. I will show data from various multi-site studies on speech perception that show the importance of capturing language variation with more ecological tools and how previous interpretations of bi/multilingualism are limited to the ways in which we categorize language users’ experiences. When captured ecologically, linguistic diversity reveals higher adaptability in language users across development and across contexts. I argue that this approach has more potential to sustain replicability in language science research.