Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
Presented in the Symposium on Sociolinguistic Cognition at LSA 2018
Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
Presented at NWAV 2017
With Dave Suggs
Presented at Kenyon Summer Scholars Conference
With Anthony Zhang, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, and Dave Suggs
Presented at Kenyon Summer Scholars Conference
With Keeta Jones and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler
Presented at NSF-REU Capstone Event & OSU-SURI Conference
The only difference between an /s/ sound, as in "sort", and an /sh/ sound, as in "short", is how far back in their mouth the speaker's tongue is. The two sounds actually exist on a continuum, and English speakers arbitrarily decide where to draw the line both when they're speaking and when they're listening. Women tend to put their tongues further forward than men do, and listeners tend to place the boundary further back for men. That is, people are more lenient when men pronounce their s's like sh's—like Sean Connery! And, when men put their s's further forward, they're usually perceived as less masculine. The primary question in this project is whether these three phenomena—how people speak, what people hear, and what they think about speakers—are cognitively related, or just socially.
Public health and psychological literature focuses on the heavy drinking that happens on college campuses and all the things it's correlated to. But cross-cultural data from the anthropological literature shows that problem drinking is best understood, and best countered, when contextualized by what's considered "good" drinking. Similarly, studies about "hookup culture" focus on when things go wrong, like sexual assault. This project aims to use qualitative methods to understand the motivation and benefits of drinking and hooking up at one college campus to contextualize and improve initiatives to keep students safe.