“Science is in everything, whether we realize it or not”: using the IPA to encourage interest in the scientific study of language

2.1 Participants

Participants were recruited at a local science museum. Three researchers wearing lab coats were positioned along a busy hallway and asked passing groups of museum visitors to participate in the IPA name tag activity. The activity was conducted on a cart in the same hallway. One adult member from each group was recruited to be the research participant and that person alone answered all the survey questions. The remaining members of the group participated in the activity but were not participants in the study itself.

A total of 117 adults participated (mean age = 39 years old, age range = 18–69 years; 87 female and 30 male). The majority (n = 92) of our participants identified as White, eight identified as Black, five as Asian, four as Hispanic/Latino, one as an Indigenous American, and seven as multiracial/multi-ethnic. Moreover, 109 participants indicated they were monolingual English speakers, and the remaining participants all spoke English well enough to engage with the activity. Participants were highly educated overall: 38 had post-college degrees, 50 had college or related degrees, 24 had a high school diploma, and the remaining five either did not have a high school diploma or chose not to answer the question. However, most participants were not experts in language science. Only 25 had ever taken a linguistics class (although 101 had taken a foreign language class).

One potential concern with recruiting in a science museum is that participants will be a nonrandom sample of people particularly interested in science. This concern is unlikely to be the case with the current sample, because recruitment was conducted while the museum was hosting an exhibit on Marvel superheroes that drew a broad audience to the museum. Indeed, many participants in this study explicitly commented that they were going to the superhero exhibit and others were wearing superhero costumes or T-shirts suggesting that they were going there.

2.2 Procedure

Before beginning the IPA name tag activity, research participants gave their consent and answered basic demographic questions on an iPad. In addition, half the participants also completed the Language Fascination scale at this time (see below). The participant, along with his or her other group members, were then engaged with the IPA name tag activity. A single researcher (the first author) conducted the activity to keep it as consistent as possible. She followed the steps laid out in Table 1, although the order of the steps was occasionally modified in response to a participant’s question or comment. A second researcher observed the interactions for fidelity and found that each step from Table 1 was completed between 93.2 and 100 % of the time. This researcher also observed the participants and recorded their behavior during the activity.

Following the IPA name tag activity, the participant completed a survey on an iPad about the experience. The first part of the survey consisted of four open-ended questions: What did you learn from this activity? What did you learn about language and/or about how language works? What did you learn about science and/or about how science works? What did you learn about how language is studied by language scientists? The second part of the survey (for those who had not already completed it) was the Language Fascination scale. This eight-item measure was developed in Wagner et al. (2022) and asks about participants’ interest in language and communication. The third part of the survey was also drawn from Wagner et al. (2022) and asked participants to assess each of three topics within language science (poetry, dialect, and audiology) for its potential scientific qualities (each quality was rated on a four-point scale): participants rated their agreement with the statement, “There is something new to discover about [this topic]”; they indicated their agreement that different kinds of people – a scientist, a practitioner, a linguist, or an amateur – could study each topic; they indicated their agreement that discoveries about the topic could be made in various ways – through observation, conversations, asking an expert, or in a lab experiment. The final part of the survey asked participants to rate (on a four-point scale) whether the IPA name tag activity had changed their level of interest in language, their level of interest in science, their ideas about how language could be studied, and their ideas about who studies language. Participants were also asked to explain each of these ratings. Altogether, the session took about 15 min per group, with about 5 min being spent on the demonstration itself.

2.3 Coding

Open-ended responses in the survey were coded through an iterative, emergent process (Williams 2008). Once the core themes had been identified, all responses were coded by the first author for the embodiment of the themes. The second author coded 20 % of each of the codes to ensure reliability. In the few cases where there were discrepancies, they were resolved by the third author.

3.1 RQ1: Does the IPA name tag activity engage participants’ interest and get them excited?

We first considered whether this activity had met the primary goal of getting people interested and excited in the topic. During the activity itself, virtually all participants (97 %) showed some measure of enjoyment, including smiling and laughing. However, only 32 % of participants asked questions during the activity and only 39 % of participants made a connection to their everyday experiences (the final step in the activity). Thus, the overall level of engagement was only moderate while the activity was being carried out.

In our most direct survey measure of interest, participants indicated that the activity had increased their interest in both language (M = 2.9 out of 4) and science (M = 2.7 out of 4). Both of these scores are significantly above the mid-point of the scale (language increase t(116) = 11.3, p < 0.001; science increase t(116) = 7.97, p < 0.001). These ratings may be artificially high due to the overall positive atmosphere of the museum. However, they are backed up by qualitative explanations provided by participants, saying they were “interested to learn more about how pronunciation works” and “science is always going to be fascinating but stuff like this, when you are able to open your mind, makes it freshly fascinating.” Indeed, 57 participants (49 %) provided comments indicating they thought they had learned something of value in the activity, 45 (38 %) explained how their interest in language had increased and 44 (38 %) mentioned ways that their interest in science had increased. Overall, therefore, the IPA name tag activity does engage people to a reasonable degree and participants generally report that it increases their interest in language and science.

3.2 RQ2: What do participants learn from the IPA name tag activity?

Our second research question was coded in an exclusively qualitative way based on participants’ open-ended responses. We identified six key themes relating to the content of the activity. These themes are shown in Table 3, along with example responses that embody each theme and the number of participants who had responses embodying each theme.

As can be seen in Table 3, participants identified many of the key components of the activity, but few participants were able to fully articulate our core message that required them to combine those components. However, while only nine participants effectively aced the test, an additional 59 participants did mention both sounds and symbols, they just did not combine them in quite the way we wanted: for example, “It’s a new way to write, and you can break down sounds.” Thus, although a thorough understanding about the relationship between sound systems and their symbolic representations was rarely achieved in this short activity, many participants had learned relevant and important information about that relationship.

3.3 RQ3: Does the IPA name tag activity change participants’ ideas about who studies language and how it is studied?

Finally, we asked whether engaging with the IPA name tag activity would increase participants’ perception that language can be studied scientifically. Our primary measure for this research question was participants’ endorsements on three science-oriented statements for three language topics (poetry, dialect, and audiology): there is something new to be discovered about this topic; scientists study it; one can learn about it through experimental lab studies. We do not have a within-subject change measure for these ratings (we did not administer the questions before and after the activity), but in Wagner et al. (2022) we did use the same task with an equivalent group of 540 adults (visitors to the same museum) who had not seen the IPA name tag activity (or any other language activity from our group). We treated these equivalent adults as representing the baseline for these items allowing us to make principled comparisons.

To verify that our baseline participants were similar to our current participants, we first compared the two groups on their Language Fascination scores. We found that the current participants had an equivalent interest in language (M = 2.86) to the baseline group (M = 2.93), t(610) = 1.44, p = 0.15. (Note that there was no difference in Language Fascination scores for current participants who took the scale before or after the activity, p = 0.43.) However, we did find a difference between participants who had just completed the IPA name tag activity and the baseline group for their science-oriented ratings of language topics. As can be seen in Figure 1, the science-oriented endorsements are higher for all questions for all three language topics for the IPA adults (white bars) compared to the baseline adults (gray bars). Moreover, those differences are significant for all questions except for one audiology question (using experimental methods). We note that the audiology topic area had generated the highest levels of science-oriented endorsements in the baseline and participants in the current study had less room to improve upon them.

Figure 1:

Mean endorsement ratings for three science-oriented statements for three language science topic areas. All differences are significant except for the endorsement of experimental methods for audiology. Poetry comparisons: Something new, t(661) = 2.69, p = 0.008; scientists do it, t(661) = 11.88, p < 0.001; experimental methods, t(661) = 4.36, p < 0.001. Dialect comparisons: Something new, t(661) = 4.05, p < 0.001; scientists do it, t(661) = 4.6, p < 0.001; experimental methods, t(661) = 11.55, p < 0.001. Audiology comparisons: Something new, t(661) = 2.5, p = 0.013; scientists do it, t(661) = 2.69, p = 0.0073; experimental methods, t(661) = 1.28, p = 0.199.

The qualitative results of the survey reinforce these findings. One participant stated: “It [the demonstration] reminded me how much I love this stuff … as a teacher, scholar, general nerd. I’ve always held that language is a living and evolving thing, and I hadn’t really thought of poetry or lyrics as being studied by scientists as opposed to lit folks, so now I’m super curious about that field.” Other participants (n = 18) explicitly stated that they learned “that linguists are scientists.” Another participant said: “I guess it opens my mind to the types of scientists out there. I have heard of linguistics but never thought about what they do or how they study language.” Other participants mentioned that they previously thought that linguists “just interpreted and translated.” Therefore, these results indicate that whether participants had no idea what linguists did, or thought their work was simply related to translation and interpreting, a short linguistics demonstration has the power to open their minds to the scientific study of language.