Dialect focus of experiment

Science: Student in Orkney to see if people store words like foreign language

The ways in which the human brain processes Orcadian dialect is at the centre of a new study from a Scottish university.

Ryan Kemp, a fourthyear psychology student from Dundee’s Abertay University, is on Orkney to follow up on high-profile research published last year which showed the brain treats a dialect and a language in the same way.

Led by Abertay’s Dr Neil Kirk, that study used a series of tests to measure how quickly the brain can react when asked to switch between standard speech and regional dialects.

Study participants were given a list of both English and Dundonian words.

Depending on the colour, they were asked to say that word in either English or Dundonian.

Using similar techniques, Mr Kemp will test Orcadian volunteers.

Dr Kirk said: “While we are replicating some elements of the Dundonian study, we have also added additional components.

“The purpose is to investigate further how these dialect varieties are stored in the brain, and whether it is similar to speaking two separate languages.”

In Dr Kirk’s original study, the length of time that elapsed from an image appearing on screen to the participant saying each word was known as the “switch cost”.

It was a discovered that this switch cost remained the same for people comfortable with both English and Dundonian.

But for those with one language stronger than the other, in this case English participants with little or no previous experience of Dundonian, the switch cost was greater when reverting back to English.

Dr Kirk said that one explanation for this is that both varieties are always active, but in order to speak one of them, you need to suppress or inhibit the other variety.

When compared to previous language research, the results of the study showed bidialectals displayed the same switch cost pattern as bilinguals who have two equally strong languages, suggesting that different dialects (or closely related language varieties) are stored in the brain in similar ways as languages.

If you would like to get involved, email dialect@ abertay.ac.uk

STUDY: Ryan Kemp is to test Orcadians on their dialect. Here he holds a sign with the Scots word for “small”