Linguistics majors Katie Arnold and Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie, along with Psychology major and Linguistics minor Audrey Yu, have been selected as 2025 Koret Scholars! This competitive scholarship, which comes with a $2,000 award, is awarded to up to 50 students each year for their exceptional research.
The WHASC Editors invited each of them to share a few words about their research projects:
Katie Arnold
I received the Koret Award for my senior thesis, which investigates the nonnative perception of Italian consonant length. Three participant groups with different Italian proficiencies—naïve, beginner, advanced—will be asked to discriminate between short and long consonants in /VCV/ and /VCCV/ Italian nonce and low-frequency words. The working hypotheses of my thesis are that (i) English speakers will be more sensitive to vowel length differences compared to consonant length differences; (ii) that English speakers will require more dramatic contrasts for accurate discrimination of consonant length while being able to detect more subtle vowel distinctions; and (iii), that language proficiency will have a positive effect on consonant length detection, with advanced listeners detecting short-long differences more accurately than their naïve and beginner counterparts.
Elliot-Elyjah Mcwhinnie
As a Koret scholar, my research will focus on the nuances of African American Language (AAL) in California. Through my research, I seek to understand and discover the participation of AAL speakers in the California Vowel Shift.
Audrey Yu
My research project is entitled “Person or Condition First: Language Effects on Parent-Child Conversations About Traits.” When we speak to children, we often make topics simpler and give information in a way that allows them to be easily digested. We know that parent-child interaction heavily influences how children perceive the world around them (McHugh et al., 2024). However, we currently do not know how parents explain complex topics such as disability and mental illness. Prior work suggest the children think about disabilities in essentialist ways (i.e., due to something internal and unchangeable about the person), which has been linked to bias (Menendez & Gelman, 2024). In this project, I want to investigate how parents explain mental and physical traits (including mental illness and several disabilities) to their children and how this conversations influence how children think about these topics. To explore this, we will recruit 60 parent-child dyads with children 5 to 8 years of age. Each participant will receive a Qualtrics survey where they will be randomly assigned a series of vignettes that use person-first (e.g., “autistic person”) or condition-first language (e.g., “person with autism”). After each vignette, dyads will discuss three questions: Why do you think [character] is [trait]? Would [character]’s kids also be [trait] even if they were raised by someone else? What are some things that you think [character] can or cannot do because they are [trait]? I hypothesize that dyads will be less likely to use essentialist ideas when given stories that are person-first. This project will help elucidate our understanding of how children develop an understanding of disability.
Congratulations, Audrey, Elliot, and Katie!
