Collaborative IRES Track 1: Experimental Linguistics in the Caribbean: Examining the nature, processing and acquisition of Haitian Creole

U.S. students, including students from underrepresented groups, do not enroll in STEM-related careers in the numbers the U.S. needs, even though STEM career opportunities are quickly growing. This includes speech-language-hearing-communication sciences and computational linguistics. High school students associate the study of language with literature and therefore the Arts; however, the scientific study of language—linguistics—involves STEM-related skills from the development of models grounded in logical arguments to the development and testing of hypotheses and the use of research strategies that involve technologies, data collection, quantitative analyses and interpretations to support the confirmation/rejection of hypotheses or models (Denam et al., 2018). The use of such linguistic knowledge may pave the way for students, especially speakers of languages other than English, to gain STEM-based skills and familiarity with STEM-related professional and research fields. The IRES award, “Experimental Linguistics in the Caribbean,” will train a diverse group of U.S. students enrolled in communication science, cognitive science, education, linguistics and psychology programs to conduct STEM-based experimental language science projects focused on the nature and learnability of Haitian Creole. Students will participate in a rigorous seven-week program of research involving six modules that they can subsequently transfer to other cultural and linguistic contexts in the course of their academic and professional journey. Experimental linguistics emerging from the development of models in cognitive sciences and technological advances has expanded our understanding of language acquisition and processing. The program will train sixteen U.S. students, at least half from groups underrepresented in STEM, to conduct rigorous experimental protocols on the nature, processing and acquisition of Haitian Creole in a non-Western socio-cultural context, thanks to collaboration with the faculty and students in Linguistics at the State University of Haiti. The project will address the shortcomings of previous exclusively theoretically-based research and empirically investigate three main areas in Haitian Creole, namely: (i) Phonological Perception and Production in Adults and Children; (ii) Morphophonology and Morphosyntax: Nature, Processing and Acquisition; (iii) Contexts of Acquisition, Learning and Use of Haitian Creole/L1 and French/English/Spanish/L2/3/4. The program will contribute to the field in three distinct ways: (i) outcomes of student research projects will provide shared data and contribute to the resolution of theoretical debates; (ii) the establishment of experimental linguistic research in a complex sociolinguistic context that characterizes many developing countries will provide a model for future programs in other non-Western countries; (iii) it will equip students from diverse cultural, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds under-represented in Higher Education with academic, interpersonal and collaborative skills required to become successful in their academic and professional careers. The aim is to foster a new generation of researchers and practitioners who will perceive their minority status as a professional asset and who will continue to use transferable general and field-specific STEM-based skills to work with and on under-represented ethnic, cultural and linguistic minorities. This IRES Track I award is cofunded by the Linguistics Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.