Taylor Bugglin ’14 spent her summer traveling to as many festivals, fairs and socials as possible.
While she did try a few strawberries at the Bolivar Strawberry Festival and watched the Avon Heritage Duct Tape Festival parade, Bugglin was not there for the deep-fried treats and local entertainment.
Instead, she was conducting an Investigative Studies research project for Marietta College. Launched in 1998, the Investigative Studies Program embraces three goals: to provide students with an opportunity to pursue their research and creative interests in a manner not found in a typical class setting, to promote intellectual curiosity and stimulate creativity in students in an academic discipline or between disciplines, and to foster a sense of learning, sharing and commitment with a community of scholars.
“The goal of my research was to test to see if there was a link between the dialect spoken and a listener’s perception of the content,” Bugglin says. “I asked several questions in this research.”
For example, she would ask things like:
• Do people actually approach content differently based on the dialect being used by a speaker?
• Are people, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, trying to affirm their own stereotypes of dialect by listening to a speaker and focusing on content differently?
• If a listener already holds the belief that a speaker's dialect is unintelligent, is the listener looking for factors in the speech that support this idea?
Bugglin faced a number of roadblocks, including the background noise at the events and trying to help prospective test subjects feel comfortable about participating in the research.
“If they did help me, I would tell them afterward what I was doing and that always seemed to spark such a lively conversation,” Bugglin says. “It’s so interesting to include studies that have to do with people because people are fascinating. I really do enjoy research, especially since my main study is dialect studies.”
However, she took on this project without having any research to follow in the footsteps. She says that some dialect researchers believed that nonlinguists’ ideas of dialect didn’t really matter that much. Then, the idea of “perceptual dialectology” came along, and its goal was to focus on the perception ordinary speakers had about language variation.
“Perceptual dialectology studies found that people held preconceived beliefs about certain dialects, such as how intelligent or pleasant those dialects sound,” Bugglin says. “I was interested in the beliefs nonlinguists had about dialects, but I wanted to try to test these beliefs in application, to remove the ‘overt’ aspect of the study.”
She started by choosing a reading selection — part of a transcript from the BYU TV show American Ride, and the particular episode featured gunslingers. She proceeded to record three different readers, each with a different dialect, reading the segment. These three dialects were Standard American English, Appalachian English and Northern (England) English.
She then found 60 participants — 20 hearing each recording — and they had to answer questions such as “How did the speaker describe Allison?” and they also had to rate the intelligence of Allison, the intelligence of the speaker, and how knowledgeable the speaker was on the subject of Allison, on a scale of one to 10.
“Though the intelligence ratings of the speakers were not statistically significant, the Northern English speaker did have the slightly higher average score, which I mention despite lack of significance only because so many people said he was hard to understand,” Bugglin says. “In fact, of the six who directly stated this point on their response sheets, four still gave him an intelligence score of 7, 8, or 9. One other person gave him a 3 and the sixth person declined to answer the ratings question.”
Dr. Janie Rees-Miller, Bugglin’s adviser on the summer project, says it was a pleasure to work with a student with such passion for the topic.
“She got bitten by the linguistics bug during her first linguistics course and has always been interested in how she could apply the concepts she learned to real-life examples of the way people speak and their attitudes toward speech,” says Rees-Miller, Professor of Linguistics. “This project was a natural outgrowth of her intellectual curiosity. Through designing the project, working out glitches in the protocol, and learning how to use the statistics program SPSS, she exemplified the kind of process that the Investigative Studies Program fosters.”
Designed for Marietta College’s most academically gifted and highly motivated students, the IS Program provides summer grants for undergraduates interested in pursuing special research and creative projects, as well as travel grants for presentation of findings at regional and national conferences. The program funds projects across the disciplines and is aimed at the kind of student interested not only in learning knowledge, but also in discovering and creating it.
Rees-Miller says Bugglin took full advantage of the IS opportunity.
“When Taylor is ready to apply to graduate school in linguistics, I will be able to write a glowing recommendation for her abilities to conceive a research project, see it through, and interpret the results,” Rees-Miller says.
TOM PERRY
