Course Description
Social stereotypes – i.e., widely shared beliefs that specific traits or acts are characteristic of particular social groups – play a major role in different domains of human reasoning and behavior, including speech production and perception and pragmatic reasoning. Yet, since stereotypes often reflect overgeneralized or simply inaccurate beliefs, these are not straightforwardly accounted for under existing cognitive models of language. As a result, much remains to be seen on how these social representations should be incorporated in theories concerned with capturing different domains of linguistic communication – e.g., speech processing; pragmatic inferences; identity construction.
This course will introduce students to work on social stereotyping, highlighting recent research on the role of stereotypes and social cognition in two lines of linguistic research central to the instructors’ research programs: speech processing and pragmatic reasoning. By engaging with diverse strands of literature across different linguistic subfields and adjacent disciplines, students will reinterpret linguistic research through the lens of social cognition and stereotyping; be pushed to theorize about cognitive approaches to the role of stereotypes in a range of linguistic behaviors, and ultimately develop an original perspective on the link between language variation and linguistic cognition.
Area Tags: Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, Pragmatics, Variation, Perception, Social Meaning
(Session 1) Tuesday/Friday 1:30pm – 2:50pm
Location: ILC S140
Instructors: Andrea Bertrama & Lacey Wade
Andrea Beltrama is a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained his Ph.D from the University of Chicago in 2016. His research focuses on the study of meaning across its semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic dimensions, as he combines formal and experimental methods to illuminate the connection between two fundamental properties of human language: its ability to represent thoughts and objects; and its ability to shape social practices central to human life — e.g., building common ground; constructing social identity; forging relationships. His work focuses on different phenomena, including (im)precision, gradability and scalarity; subjective and emotive language; and human-AI interaction.
Lacey Wade is a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her Ph.D. in 2020. Her research focuses on understanding what people know about language and the people who use it, with an emphasis on phonetic and phonological variation. Her work combining experimental and naturalistic data has shown that people know a lot about language and social factors, and this influences not just the way they process language, but also the way they use language themselves. She’s particularly interested in perception-production relationships, sociolinguistic stereotypes, and how our constantly evolving experiences shape our linguistic behaviors.
