2024 Freeman Lecture: J. Michael Terry (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

It is our great pleasure to welcome back to campus J. Michael Terry of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Terry, who graduated our PhD program in 2004, will be presenting this year's Freeman Lecture. A title and abstract for Professor Terry's talk appear below.

Professor Terry is a renowned expert on the linguistics of African American English (AAE), especially its semantics (meanings) in comparison to other varieties of English. More recently, his work has broadened to include experimental studies of how AAE is processed by speakers in real time, employing methodologies like EEG (brainwave) measuring methods and other techniques borrowed from the field of psycholinguistics. For more information, please see Professor Terry's faculty page and profile below: 

- https://tarheels.live/jmterry/
- https://endeavors.unc.edu/michael-terry/

The Freeman Lecture is held annually at UMass, and is named in honor of the founding head of our Linguistics Department, Donald C. Freeman, and his wife Margaret Freeman. Previous Freeman Lecture speakers include noteworthy individuals such as Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker, and John Rickford. These talks are designed for a broad, cross-disciplinary audience of students and faculty across campus. 

The following is the title and abstract for Professor Terry's Freeman Lecture: 

Can Linguistic Differences Affect African American English Speaking 2nd Graders Performance on Math Tests?

Far from being homogenous, American English is instead spoken as numerous dialects associated with different regions, income levels, and racial and ethnic groups throughout the United States. Few, if any, American English speakers are native speakers of Standard Classroom English (SCE) – the dialect of choice and language of instruction in the vast majority of US schools. How similar one’s home dialect is to this school standard can vary greatly from speaker to speaker, and students who speak so-called non-Standard dialects like African American English (AAE) – dialects that are socially and structurally distanced from SCE in important ways – can face challenges that result, not from any defect in their home language (or person, for that matter), but from the stigmatization of that language and from mismatches between their home and school grammars. Such mismatches can lead to misunderstandings, confusion, and ultimately poor performance in testing situations.  

In this talk, we consider one such mismatch. While present day English has lost most of the verbal suffixes that in earlier English marked different types of subjects (I love, you lovest, he loveth), most mainstream varieties of English—but not AAE-- still require –s to be added to present tense verbs with third person subjects (Mary drinks coffee).   Previous studies suggest that the more instances of verbal -s a math word problem contains, the worse some AAE speaking children do at answering the problem, indicating that test scores may not accurately reflect the children’s understanding of math concepts. Building on these findings, this talk discusses a more recent study aimed at investigating how AAE speaking second graders process the verbal -s found in math word problems and in school language – the language students are taught and tested in – generally. In addition to an orally administered test of math word problems, the study included an auditory Event Related Potential (ERP) investigation of the second graders’ brainwave responses to verbal -s.  The results suggest that mismatches between the children’s linguistic system and the language of the math problems increase the cognitive load on these young test takers.