The Perception of Mixed Utterances by Jamaican Bilinguals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Language in Jamaica is marked by high variation (Patrick, 2004 as cited in Kennedy, 2017) among speakers across all linguistic contexts (Christie, 2003). This is caused by two broad factors: firstly, by the varying linguistic repertoires among speakers, with some speakers being dominant Jamaican Creole (JC) speakers, some dominant Standard Jamaican English speakers (SJE), and some balanced bilinguals (Kennedy, 2017) and secondly, by the blurred boundary between English, the language brought to the island by British colonizers in 1655, and Jamaican Creole, the de facto National language of the country and language of the majority (Farquharson, 2013), whose genesis is attributed to language contact between speakers of English and various African languages during the period of colonization in the country. Because of the relationship between these languages in their structure and usage, they are proposed to exist on a continuum, with forms closer to Jamaican Creole being basilectal forms at one end and forms closer to Mainstream English being acrolectal forms on the other end (DeCamp, 1971). These however, are idealized forms, as most speech lies between poles, and speech found here are called mesolectal forms. These forms are likely the result of language mixing that has been present since the creation of JC (Patrick, 2013) and continued contact between JC and its lexifier, SJE.\n\nThe purpose of this research project is to determine how Jamaican speakers process linguistic forms that do not neatly belong to either language by observing where they judge linguistic utterances to belong on a visual depiction of the proposed language continuum. The placement of these utterances by participants of this study will be tested against two social variables: the geographical location of speakers and their language attitudes. The first variable will be tested by including speech perception by Jamaicans living in the island and those living in the diaspora, namely various cities in Canada and the United States of America. The second variable will be tested by asking participants about their attitudes towards language use in Jamaican contexts, specifically JC that has held an inferior social status to SJE in Jamaica, because of its perception as a broken variety of English (Kouwenberg et al., 2011), associated with poverty and a lack of education (Christie, 2003).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".