Acknowledging language variation and its power: Keys to justice and equity in applied psycholinguistics

Recent studies have demonstrated incontrovertibly that person perception influences language perception. Much of this research is predicated on the notion that social categories are stable constructs that are perceived similarly by members of various speech communities. Power differentials necessari...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Applied psycholinguistics 2023-07, Vol.44 (4), p.495-513
Main Authors:	Tripp, Alayo, Munson, Benjamin
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Beliefs Dialect Studies Epistemology Equity Ethics Evidence Inferences Justice Knowledge Language Language Processing Language variation Legibility Linguistic Theory Linguistics Original Article Phonemes Psycholinguistics Social Behavior Social Cognition Social Differences Social perception Sociolinguistics Speech Speech communities Speech perception Towards a Just and Equitable Applied Psycholinguistics Vowels
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Summary:	Recent studies have demonstrated incontrovertibly that person perception influences language perception. Much of this research is predicated on the notion that social categories are stable constructs that are perceived similarly by members of various speech communities. Power differentials necessarily impact the legibility of the social performances circumscribed by macrosociological categories and thus bely any claim to objectivity in these categorization systems. Developing a more just applied psycholinguistics requires researchers to explicitly consider the role of power in language, how power shapes fields’ notions of what research questions are important and meaningful, and therefore how research data are collected, analyzed, and disseminated. We argue that psycholinguists should widely adopt approaches to studying linguistic processing in ways which acknowledge the role of social ideologies in shaping their outcome, and which reckon with how asymmetrical power relations shape the perception, acquisition, and judgment of both social and linguistic variation. We conclude with a series of guidelines intended to promote characterizations of social and linguistic diversity which accurately reflect the importance of power differentials and which engage ethically with sociopolitical goals of justice and equity.
ISSN:	0142-7164 1469-1817