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Summer Dialect Research Project Report

From Lisa Green and Barbara Pearson:

Twelve talented students from around the country participated in the Summer Dialect Research Project (SDRP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (June 3-17). The SDRP was the first research workshop for undergraduates on current issues in the study of African American English (AAE) sponsored by the newly created Center for the Study of African American Language.

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The SDRP students were selected on the basis of prior courses on AAE-related topics and interest in pursuing graduate research in some area of study of AAE. During the two-week program, the students participated in seminars and work sessions with faculty and other presenters: Lisa Green, Tom Roeper, Lisa Selkirk, Peggy Speas (all of UMass Amherst Linguistics), Theresa Austin (Education), Rob Cox (Library Special Collections), Peter Elbow (English), Denise Gaskin (Education), Barbara Pearson (Research Liason and Development), Steven Tracy (Afro-American Studies), Shelley Velleman (Communication Disorders) (all of UMass Amherst), Frances Burns (Communication Disorders at Texas State), Jill de Villiers (Psychology at Smith College), Peter de Villiers (Psychology at Smith College), and J. Michael Terry (Linguistics at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and UMass Amherst Linguistics alum).

The seminars and work sessions were on topics such as syntactic and semantic variation in AAE in different regions and communities, intonation and perceptions of "sounding black," and developmental patterns in child AAE. Special presentations were on topics such as writing and features of AAE, language use in the blues, and dialects, literacy and reading.

The SDRP culminated with a student symposium dedicated to Professor Emeritus Harry Seymour. The students reported on their projects, which were related to research topics in seminars and work with large computerized corpora and other databases.

SDRP seminar