{"id":20060,"date":"2022-11-17T10:38:26","date_gmt":"2022-11-17T15:38:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/?p=20060"},"modified":"2023-10-30T18:01:11","modified_gmt":"2023-10-30T22:01:11","slug":"20060","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/2022\/11\/17\/20060\/","title":{"rendered":"BU Humanists at Work: Meet Amy Hutchinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics Amy Hutchinson stumbled into linguistics by accident.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As a freshmen at the University of South Florida, she set out to major in Public Health. After quickly realizing that Public Health wasn\u2019t the right fit, she switched to an International Business major, which required her to become proficient in a foreign language. Hutchinson decided to stick with French, the language she had taken in high school, hoping to test out of a few semesters of lower level French language classes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

French was not her favorite subject in high school<\/span>, but for reasons she still isn\u2019t sure of, she found French class in a university setting fascinating. As a French language learner, Hutchinson became infatuated with accents and why we have them, a curiosity that prompted her to enroll in an introductory linguistics course.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One linguistics class turned into several, and Hutchinson soon found herself in the lab working on research projects alongside linguistics faculty members. She describes these early research experiences as \u201chuge for me.\u201d <\/span>Although the University of South Florida didn\u2019t have a linguistics major, it did have linguists on its faculty. \u201cI don\u2019t know if I would have ended up going to grad school in linguistics if I hadn\u2019t seen what linguistics research actually looks like,\u201d says Hutchinson, who graduated with double majors in French and German and a minor in Applied Linguistics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, the same curiosities about accents and speech that first led Hutchinson to an introductory linguistics course permeate her research, which \u201clies broadly in the fields of phonetics and second language acquisition.\u201d As a PhD student at Purdue University (\u201822), Hutchinson developed a dissertation project that examined \u201cthe effect of foreign language film on non-native speech production and perception.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Growing up in Florida, a state with a huge population of native Spanish speakers, Hutchinson knew many English language learners. She would often hear friends or their family members say things like \u201cI learned English by watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S.\u201d As a linguist, Hutchinson was curious about what that meant. \u201cWhat did they actually learn? Vocabulary? Sentence structure? Or could they have learned something as fine-grained as how to pronounce words in another language? There\u2019s been research on film in second language learning and how it can improve your cultural competency and how you communicate, but aspects of language like speech haven’t received much attention\u201d she explains.<\/span><\/p>\n

To probe this inquiry, Hutchison asked native North American English speakers with no prior French training to pronounce a few sounds that exist in French but do not exist in English. She then had participants watch a movie in French for forty-five minutes and asked them to pronounce the same set of sounds again afterwards. Hutchinson recorded each participant\u2019s speech before and after exposure to the French film and measured differences in their articulation by looking at their speech sound waves and by asking native French speakers to identify which of each participant\u2019s two recordings \u201csounded more French.\u201d Her analysis found that participants \u201cgot a little bit better\u201d at producing the unfamiliar French sounds after exposure to the film.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hutchinson hopes that her research will ultimately inform language pedagogy and aid foreign language learners who aren’t able to regularly communicate with native speakers. \u201cWe know that in second language speech acquisition it\u2019s essential to have input in that language. We need to hear the language, but there hasn\u2019t been a lot of research into what that input should look like. Most people assume that it needs to be from physical interaction with actual humans, which is the case when babies learn their first language. Does it? My research suggests maybe not. Maybe it could be a film. We haven’t really figured it out yet,\u201d she explains. These days, Hutchinson is working on acquiring funding for a longitudinal study that will build on her dissertation project.<\/span><\/p>\n

Next semester, Hutchinson will draw on her research and specialization to teach an advanced class in phonological theory. She will also teach a class at the other end of the specialization spectrum, Introduction to Linguistics. She sees this class as having a direct and practical application to a number of fields, including early childhood education, second language instruction, and computer science.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond these applications, however, Hutchinson would also recommend the intro course to undergraduates who, like her former self, are considering majors and career paths that don\u2019t <\/span>seem<\/span><\/i> related to linguistics at all. \u201cLinguistics courses in general tell us a lot about how we see people and how we experience society. Language tells us so much about identity, where we\u2019re from, our socio-economic status, our gender etc. . . . There\u2019s a lot wrapped up in the language we use everyday that we don\u2019t really think about. You can learn so much about culture and society by studying the language people use,\u201d she says. These broad, humanistic applications of basic linguistics training lead Hutchinson to call Introduction to Linguistics \u201cone of my favorite classes to teach.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics Amy Hutchinson stumbled into linguistics by accident.\u00a0 As a freshmen at the University of South Florida, she set out to major in Public Health. After quickly realizing that Public Health wasn\u2019t the right fit, she switched to an International Business major, which required her to become proficient in a foreign […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[387,398,400],"tags":[348],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20060"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20060"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21601,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20060\/revisions\/21601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/humanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}