Nikole Patson is a psycholinguistics professor at the Ohio State University, who’s been doing lingcomm with Girl Scouts in Columbus, Ohio, USA. Dr Patson kindly answered our questions for this inaugeral LingComm IRL interview, a series edited by Gretchen McCulloch and Leah Velleman highlighting face-to-face, community-driven linguistics communication activities without much of a web presence to help lingcommers learn from each others’ experiences in doing local activities.
How did you get started working with Girl Scouts in your area?
I am one of the directors of the Language Pod, a language science lab at the Center for Science and Industry (COSI) in Columbus, OH. I was put in contact with a program manager at the Girl Scouts who is in charge of coordinating partners for programming. They were very excited to work with us and flexible with content. The Girl Scouts did all of the advertising, we just did the program.
What sort of lingcomm project did you do with the your local Girl Scout troop?
We developed a program based on the Cadette’s [age 11-14] public speaking badge. The girls did not earn the full badge with us, but the activities were fun and allowed us to get in some language science content. We are making this an annual event.
What are a few specific things you did that the Girl Scouts resonated with?
We had the Girls play charades, read poems out loud, and read words and sentences with different emotions. These were the requirements for the Public Speaking Badge. We infused a bit of linguistics/language science into each of the activities. For example, we discussed prosody when talking about emotions and used Jabberwocky as one of the poems.
What’s something you’d do differently next time?
We would love to see more language science in the Girl Scout curriculum. The public speaking badge was not ideal, but was the best fit for doing this work. We’re going to continue the program to keep the relationship, but we are interested in exploring new possibilities, including creating a language science badge. We’re open to collaborators if you are already working with the Girl Scouts in your region!
Where can people find more about you or get in touch if they’re working on a similar project?
Send me an email: patson.3@osu.edu
LingComm IRL is a series bringing attention to under-documented face-to-face lingcomm projects. Do you know of a great IRL lingcomm project that doesn’t have much if any information about it online yet? Let us know! Does your lingcomm project have a website with information about its structure so other people can use it as a model? Let us know so we can link to it from the LingComm Resources page.
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