Plenary Speakers
 

Dennis Preston, Michigan State University
Linguistic profiling: How your brain can fool your ear

Everybody likes to be on the side of the angels. Bad guys who discriminate against applicants for housing or loans on the basis of their supposed gender, ethnicity, or even sexual orientation on the basis of the applicant’s voice should be punished. They are guilty of what John Baugh calls “linguistic profiling.” But should those accused of criminal behavior have their ethnicity, age, gender and so forth identified as belonging to one of those groups by a witness, even a law officer, who has heard but not seen the accused? Many studies show such identifications by nonspecialists to be very good, and current law states that such identification is proper, but the law, to be kind to it, is linguistically naive. Even if we fix it to make it more linguistically sophisticated, how shall we deal with studies that show that such identification can be radically redirected on the basis of contextual or other information? If we want to apply linguistics to such matters, we must be very careful to use the best linguistics. This paper explores the pitfalls of profiling, particularly from the point of view of acoustic phonetics and the cognitive foundations of the social psychology of language.

Dennis R. Preston (University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University; Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) has been visiting professor at Hawaii, Arizona, and Michigan and a Fulbright Scholar in Poland and Brazil. He was Co-Director of the 1990 TESOL Institute and Director of the 2003 LSA Institute. He served as President of the American Dialect Society (2001-2) and on the Executive Boards of that society and LSA, as well as on the editorial boards of Language, the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and the Journal of Sociolinguistics. His work focuses on sociolinguistics and dialectology, and he is perhaps best known for the revitalization of folk linguistics and variationist accounts of SLA. He has directed four recent NSF grants in folk linguistics and language variation and change. His most recent book-length publications are, with N. Niedzielski, Folk Linguistics (2000), with D. Long, A Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume II (2002), Needed Research in American Dialects (2003), and, with B. Joseph and C. G. Preston, Linguistic diversity in Michigan and Ohio (2005). He is a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2004.

Email: preston@msu.edu
URL: http://www.msu.edu/~preston/