Hello! I am Kennedy Milton, an undergraduate student working towards completing my Honors In the Major (HITM) project. I am currently Communication Science and Disorders major! When I came into college, I already knew that this was the field that I wanted to go into, initially hoping to work inside of schools as a speech therapist for students. Throughout the past year in the program, I have gotten more involved in research, and shifted away from the initial goals that I came into the program with. After learning about my college’s role in understanding and helping people that speak various languages and dialects, I became curious to know more about the overlap in sociology and dialect, which would technically fall under the sociolinguistic perceptions of dialect usage.
I was very interested in law and government while I was in high school, and sought to find a connection between speech therapy and law/courtrooms. In creating my HITM project, I overlapped both of these fields, and am looking to understand undergraduate and pre-speech language pathology students perceptions of credibility when listening to speakers who use dialect, such as African American English (AAE) in comparison to their perceived credibility of speakers who use General American English (GAE).
My project looks to measure the perceptions of credibility among undergraduate students inside of Communication Science and Disorders majors, using mock trial transcripts that highlight African American English features. For my study, I will provide two written court cases, one with distinctive African American English dialectal features and the other with Mainstream American English features. Participants will first read through the court cases and then rate their perceived credibility of the testimonies given using a five point Likert scale. Through measuring the perceptions of credibility among these undergraduate students, I am able to ensure that linguistic biases are not occurring, as they develop into licensed Speech Language Pathologists in the future. This bias testing among undergraduate students has further implications within the courtroom, as there is a possibility for Speech Language Pathologists to act as expert witnesses inside of courtrooms, due to their expertise of dialectal variation and communication disorders, which could distort the perceptual credibility of a witness among a jury.
I hope that through working on this project, I will gather data that can be used to develop further research questions and projects down the line. I would love to continue my graduate education here at FSU and develop a masters thesis that continues on this project. Over the summer, I will collect data for my HITM project, from undergraduate communication science and disorders students. In order to incentivize participation in my research, I will advertise that the first 100 participants will receive a $10 gift card. I would love to receive data from students across the country, helping us see if there are geographical differences that would cause undergraduate students perceptions of credibility of dialect to differ.
This past semester, I had the opportunity to present at the Undergraduate Research Symposium (URS), in which I was able to have great discussions with numerous students and professors from various fields. There were many different law students who were interested in specific nuances of my project, and hoped to learn more about “Expert Witnesses.” Though I did not have all of the answers for them about specific cases within courtrooms, I was able to learn from them and hear their unique perspectives about my topic of research, understanding more about the benefits of this project from a lawyers perspective. Several sociolinguistic professors also came to my poster, hoping to hear more about the overlap in their field and communication science and disorders. I don’t think I realized how interdepartmental my projects focus became until this poster presentation, when I realized the value of the project and the work that can be done in this area of research.
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