8 Decolonizing (Psycho)linguistics Means Dropping the Language Gap Rhetoric

Megan Figueroa is a developmental psycholinguist and research scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona. She is also the co-host of The Vocal Fries, a podcast about linguistic discrimination. She completed her PhD in linguistics at the University of Arizona in 2018, where her doctoral work focused on children’s morphosyntactic development and overgeneralization of linguistic patterns. Her latest work addresses the cultural mismatch between research on children’s language development and the diverse realities of children’s language environments and linguistic repertoires. Her perspective is shaped by her own experience growing up in a working-class Mexican American home. She recognized her family in deficit-based descriptions of language development in the literature, and she endeavors to broaden our collective understanding of language development by disrupting these inequitable and inaccurate descriptions.

The US is a settler-colonial state that, since its inception, “destroys to replace” to maintain white supremacy (Wolfe, 2006). Language has always been central to the colonial project. US President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed, “America is a nation—not a polyglot boarding house . . . There can be but one loyalty—to the Stars and Stripes; one nationality—the American—and therefore only one language—the English language” (Maher, 2017, p. 122). Indigenous communities experienced language shift and federally attempted linguicide driven by land dispossession, forced removal, and other brutal acts of settler-colonial violence (Leonard, 2021). Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their communities to attend government-run boarding schools that forbade the use of Indigenous languages, with the goal, as stated by the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Jonathan Atkins, that “their barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English language substituted” (Atkins, 1978). Decades later, my father and his classmates were met with corporal punishment for speaking Spanish, the only language they knew, while attending public school in Bisbee, Arizona in the 1950s. Decades later, I would not speak Spanish because settler-colonialism, in linguistics and beyond, destroys to replace.

As scholars have shown, linguistics has played a key role in these colonizing processes (e.g., Errington, 2008). While most discussions of this issue have focused on historical linguistics, language documentation, and sociolinguistics, the field of psycholinguistics also bears responsibility for the colonial mindset of much of contemporary linguistics. In this chapter, I examine the putative “language gap” as an example of ongoing colonial and racist rhetoric that permeates psycholinguistic research. (I refer to the notion of a “ language gap” and idea of “quality” language input within quotations or mark these terms with the phrase “so-called” to emphasize the subjective nature of these descriptions and to communicate that I do not support their underlying racist assumptions.) The “language gap” is the preposterous claim that racialized and otherwise historically marginalized children are exposed to lesser “quality” language input than middle and upper-class white children, leading to “less successful” language development. “Racialized” is to be understood as the people who, through colonization, chattel slavery, and subsequent oppression, have been situated as inferior in socially constructed racial terms. It is an active and ongoing process of oppression. Given that ongoing settler-colonialism relies on rhetorical and ideological devices to maintain settlers’ occupation of territory (Leonard, 2021), I argue that “language gap” rhetoric works to colonize by maintaining white supremacy through situating whiteness and its associated linguistic behaviors as both materially and immaterially valuable, while pathologizing and Othering the linguistic behaviors of racialized populations. Remediating the alleged deficiencies of racialized populations by prescribing and imposing white linguistic norms is a paternalistic, colonial, white-supremacist practice that preserves the power relationships that were violently established earlier in the settler-colonial history of the United States. This rhetoric reflects and reproduces settler-colonial violence and anti-Blackness and has no room in a decolonized and anti-racist (psycho)linguistics. At the end of the chapter, I outline some of the steps that need to be taken to move psycholinguistics toward this goal.

The notion that science is objective and that facts are value-neutral, a fundamental assumption of psycholinguistics, renders invisible the power relations that construct all knowledge (Dupree & Kraus, 2022; Else-Quest & Hyde, 2016). The knowledge that any knower brings to a given project cannot be separated from their lived experiences. Crucially, every researcher comes to a task from a particular standpoint, which provides only a limited view and understanding of the phenomenon under study (Sprague, 2005; Wylie, 2004). In addition, researchers can end up creating the phenomenon they are studying through biased research design (see also miles-hercules, 2024). In psycholinguistics, language development, and within that area of research, linguistic input, is largely studied through a white lens with a focus on white middle-and upper-class families of Western European descent (Clancy & Davis, 2019). A recent analysis of the linguistic diversity of articles in four major academic journals of child language development from their inception to 2020 (around 45 years) found that 54% of studies focused exclusively on English, and another 30% were focused on languages from the Indo-European family (Kidd & García, 2022). Further, the authors of 87% of the articles were from either North America or Europe (mostly in Northern or Western Europe). These findings are unsurprising: members of the white middle and upper classes are disproportionally represented in academia. Thus, generalizations about language development from white families of Western European descent are taken for granted as “normal” and are essentialized as “non-ideological common sense” (Fairclough, 2001, p. 31) by overwhelmingly white researchers, authors, and readers.

This is a matter of epistemology. Currently, there is no equity across epistemologies, generally, and within the field of psycholinguistics, specifically. Many racialized scholars have been told that their work engaging race and ethnicity is “not linguistics.” Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz (2020) found that many racialized linguists are not in linguistics departments at all, preferring to work in departments (though, not necessarily psychology departments) that support their research that centers on race and racial justice. This erasure of racialized scholars and students excludes their unique experiences, standpoints, and epistemologies. What happens when this is the case is that deficit perspectives of racialized children, families, and communities are promoted with little objection. As an example, Thomas Sowell claimed that “the goals and values of Mexican Americans have never centered on education” (1981, p. 266). If this work were required reading for me, I would have no trouble calling “bullshit.”

Disrupting this ideological perspective requires us to abandon the objectivist stance that white supremacy can hide behind. One way to do this is by using the tool of the counterstory: “a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 32). I engage with the “language gap” discourse not only as a psycholinguist, but also as a Mexican American woman and a first-generation college student from the US Southwest. I grew up mostly as an English monolingual in a working-class family. My parents were both union workers who grew up in poverty. Both of my parents speak what would be labeled as a “nonstandard” variety of English. My dad was born to Mexican immigrants and speaks both Mexican Spanish and Chicano English. My mom is Anglo and speaks a variety of English that is influenced by both Southern English and Chicano English; she understands some Spanish but doesn’t speak the language. From kindergarten to third grade, I went to a Title I segregated public school in Phoenix, Arizona. Title I is a federal designation in the US given to schools with a high proportion of low-income families. In practical terms, Title I schools are extremely underresourced and with largely racialized student populations. These are the types of students often described in “language gap” work as “low-income.”

Given my lived experience, I am situated outside of dominant ideologies and claims to truth and knowledge about language development. I am therefore better positioned to offer a critical perspective of the deficit models of racialized children’s language that I present here (Sprague, 2005). I can present a counterstory.

Simply put, the language use of racialized children, families, and communities has historically been perceived as a deficit and overtly described in terms of deficiency because the US has a foundational problem of white supremacy. Although “race” is a social construct of domination created to maintain a power dynamic that privileges white people, and not a biological reality, it has real-world consequences precisely because of racism and racialization processes (Crenshaw et al., 1995). Institutionalized racism in academia and related “helping” professions pathologizes the language use of racialized children, families, and communities, positioning them as deficient because societal structures are designed to benefit the dominant group (i.e., white people in the US context). Marking racialized groups for linguistic remediation decreases their access to opportunities and resources. This is linguistic racism. To be sure, white children living in poverty also experience some form of linguistic prejudice. However, under white supremacy, poor white children are taught to believe they can eventually hit the target of standardized linguistic competence. By contrast, even when racialized language users engage in linguistic practices that are situated as “normative” based on standardized language ideologies (i.e., when they “sound white” or “sign white”), their language will still be perceived as “deficient” when scrutinized by a white perceiving subject (Flores & Rosa, 2015). When my dad chose to speak to me as a child in English and not Spanish, he knew that raciolinguistic ideologies conflate the language use of racialized bodies with linguistic deficiency (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017). He was attempting to safeguard me against these perceived deficiencies by removing Spanish from the equation because being subjected to corporal punishment in school convinced him, consciously or not, that Spanish was a hindrance to success in a white-supremacist society.

The psycholinguistic idea of “deficient” language has been repackaged across time. The current wave of deficiency discourse began with psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley’s 1995 monograph Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, which is considered by many both inside and outside of academia as a foundational text that reifies the relationship between early home language exposure and use and later academic and economic success. Hart and Risley were interested in the linguistic environments of children across socioeconomic backgrounds: were there class-based interactional differences between caregiver and child that could account for later academic success or failure? However, the belief that any caregiver could manipulate the linguistic input their child receives in such a life-altering way that the child will be set up to “succeed” in school and beyond ignores the role of structural factors like institutionalized racism in constructing “success” and “failure” (Milner, 2012).

Hart and Risley claimed that more socioeconomically advantaged parents direct both a higher quantity of language (i.e., more words) and a higher “quality” of language (e.g., exaggerated intonation, “baby talk,” conversational dyads, syntactically complex sentences, the ever-changing list goes on) to their children than their counterparts from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, resulting in children in the latter group experiencing a “gap” of 30 million words by the time they are four years old. This claim was characterized in shorthand as the so-called word gap and later as the “language gap”. Thus, in order to succeed academically, the poor families must “bridge the gap.” Importantly, the figure 30 million is an extrapolation from averages in Hart and Risley’s observational data from 42 families—collected once a month for one hour over a two-year period—a minuscule window into children’s lives. This window is likely affected by the observer’s paradox: “The aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain this data by systematic observation” (Labov, 1972, p. 209). Since the researchers were white and all the lower-income families were Black, it is likely that the interpretations of the observational data were even less reflective of the families’ authentic linguistic behaviors. Further, only one of the middle-class families in Hart and Risley’s study was Black, so the researchers conflated socioeconomic class with race while simultaneously failing to examine the systemic patterns of historical harm under institutionalized racism. That is, classism and class-based disparities are inextricable from disparities that are due to racialization processes (Blanchett, 2006). Hence, Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities are disproportionately represented in the lowest socioeconomic groups because socioeconomic disadvantage is a key component of institutionalized racism and racial segregation is a key component of the perpetuation of poverty (Pitts-Taylor, 2019). Hart and Risley’s failure to address this fundamental fact discredits the entire study.

My introduction to the so-called language gap and Hart and Risley’s monograph was during my linguistics PhD program. Although many scholars, particularly sociolinguists, have debunked the idea of a language gap (e.g., Avineri et al., 2015; Baugh, 2017; Blum, 2017; Johnson, 2015; to name very few), I was assigned the monograph in a speech, language, and hearing course on language development. I immediately saw that the study questions, design, implementation, and conclusions are racist. Why did the authors assume that there must be language problems within poor families and communities instead of interrogating the idea that traditional measures of “success” position these populations as inherently deficient? Because of such research, families like mine are told to subscribe to the “right” kind of linguistic practices by changing their behavior toward white middle- and upper-class norms. Within a deficit paradigm, individual behaviors, not structural injustice, become the target of intervention. Studies grounded in the unquestioned reality of the “language gap” rely on the racial ideological stance of color-evasiveness, which emerges from a racially stratified society that relies on a narrative of “the American Dream” and values “equal opportunity, meritocracy, and dispositionalism” (Syed et al., 2018, p. 814). I use “color-evasiveness” following Annamma and colleagues’ (2017) expansion of color-blind racial ideology to (1) explicitly name the erasure of racialized people’s and communities’ experiences via evasion and (2) move beyond the ableism inherent in a term like “color-blind” that equates blindness with ignorance.

As a first-generation college student from a working-class Mexican American family, I already knew that the United States isn’t a meritocracy. If it were, I wouldn’t be the first in my family to go to college. I felt out of my element in graduate-level courses because of the gatekeeping nature of academia. As an example, a friend in my PhD program told me that others in our program were made uncomfortable when I talked about being from a working-class family. Knowing that, to be assigned to read flawed scholarship that claimed families and childhoods like mine were deficient was infuriating as well as further isolating because the study immediately rang false to me, yet my white classmates didn’t question it. Some even thought I was a nuisance for talking about my childhood and my family. Further, the sterile classroom environment imposed a tone of dispassionate engagement, even with a topic that was personally urgent and painful to me. I did not yet have the language to articulate how my feelings about the so-called language gap were legitimate knowledge. I now understand that in fact my viewpoint was far more relevant than my white peers or professors (Wylie, 2004), since I had grown up in a community that was directly impacted by Hart and Risley’s racist generalizations and I could offer a counterstory to the dominant discourse.

I pursued the study of linguistics because I wanted to answer a single question: Why did my dad speak Spanish and I did not? A few years ago, as the co-host of a podcast about linguistic discrimination, I had the honor of interviewing Arizona’s Chicano Poet Laurate, Alberto Álvaro Ríos. He shared his lived experience of using Spanish and English in the borderlands:

You got swatted . . . for doing something bad. So, we didn’t just learn, you know, our first lesson in language, we got our first lesson in making an equation. And our parents said listen to your teacher . . . You know that you’re going to get swatted for speaking Spanish, and you know that you speak Spanish, and you know you get swatted for doing something wrong. You make the equation. You’re feeling this with the body. Second grade comes around and the equation widens out. Your body is a little bigger and it fits more now. Because now it’s been demonstrated. You get swatted for speaking Spanish and you start to recognize by second grade: your parents speak Spanish, your family speaks Spanish, and if Spanish is bad, they, then, must be bad. Now you don’t say that out loud, but you have learned it through the mechanisms of the body, not the intellect. (Gillon & Figueroa, 2017)

As a kid, I didn’t have the ability to appreciate my dad and his standpoint, his lived experience. All I knew was that I didn’t like the situation and I wanted answers. As I got older, my lack of Spanish felt like a flesh wound and it wasn’t healing. But I was beginning to understand the type of flesh wounds that my dad carried on his body when he was six years old. I already knew that by attempting to prepare me for a white-supremacist society by withholding Spanish, my dad was performing an act of love, but reading Hart and Risley in a sterile classroom in my twenties, I learned there is no winning for us in a white-supremacist society. There I was (and others like me), in the pages of their monograph, assumed deficient based on demographic variables.

The “language gap” discourse outright ignores two axioms in the field of linguistics: first, that children learn the language variety of their environment whether spoken or signed, without direct teaching; and second, that all language varieties are systematic, rule-governed, productive, creative, and equal. How, then, could some linguistic input be “quality” and other input be deficient? Practices selectively legitimizing linguistic input as “quality” are rightly termed linguistic racism, as they function to reproduce institutionalized inequity that emphasizes standardization and favors white supremacy. As education scholar Christopher Scott points out, schooling is “the medium in which government maintains quality control on its people” (2021). Schools become spaces of hyper-surveillance. This is facilitated and accelerated by standardized tests (Milner, 2012).

Standardization does not exist without framing one group, the most powerful, as the norm (see also Henner, 2024). Deviation from the “norm,” that is, language variation and linguistic diversity, only leads to negative outcomes for racialized students when success is evaluated with measures based on linguistic racism masquerading as fact. Poor Black student’s below average performance on racist assessments does not exist and persist because of their linguistic deficits (whatever that means): rather, these measures are working as designed to perpetuate the status quo and structurally maintain white linguistic hegemony, specifically, and white supremacy, more broadly (Baker-Bell, 2020; Baugh, 2017). In fact, the economy of deficit in academia has served the “normal” child well, since standardized tests “serve the purpose of recreating the racial and class stratification that students and their families experience outside of school” (Williams & Land, 2006, p. 582).

Of course, these days most psycholinguists do not explicitly state that the language use of racialized groups is deficient; many scholars have even moved away from “gap” language altogether. Instead, the earlier charges of deficiency have been repackaged in coded terms and descriptions, like “quality” linguistic input. “Quality” linguistic input has been constructed in the developmental literature in a myriad of ways, some of them contradictory. For example, longer utterances and more relative clause use have been described as “necessary” for language development, but so has child directed speech defined by shorter utterances and exaggerated intonation (Anderson et al., 2021; Schwab & Lew-Williams, 2016). Putting aside the fact that children will learn the language to which they are exposed without special efforts from caregivers, a damning problem with the notion of “quality” linguistic input is that the features claimed to be “quality” are not universal characteristics of either communication or of child rearing. For example, many researchers consider one-at-a-time conversational turn-taking between parent and child a magic bullet in the fight to bridge the so-called language gap even though this communicative style is not universal. Similarly, wordism—the idea that the more words the better—is a value specific to certain communities and cultures (Blum, 2015). Additionally, the concept of mean length of utterance rewards children who produce longer utterances, an arbitrary measure of linguistic dis/ability. This ideology of “quality” is reflected in mainstream research methodologies. William Labov (1966) points out that standardized measures of language ability are

the natural product of educational psychology, which is concerned more with discriminating among children than finding out what a given child’s actual capacity is. By subjecting each child to a “controlled” stimulus, they are able to claim scientific status for the comparisons they make between individual children . . . and in fact, these pictures of the child’s capacity are so profoundly misleading that they are an open invitation to educational disaster. (pp. 5–6)

Labov was right. In practical terms, maintaining white linguistic hegemony through language development research under “language gap” rhetoric means measuring “intelligence,” “cognitive skills,” “language skills,” or “ability” with instruments that are testing vocabulary knowledge. For example, many studies use receptive or expressive vocabulary as their dependent measure of children’s language development. As a review of studies of the effects of linguistic environment on children’s later cognitive and language development found, “The most commonly used standardized assessment to measure language or cognitive development was the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MCDI)” (Zauche et al., 2016, p. 321). The MCDI is a parent-completed instrument in which caregivers indicate which words on a predetermined list their children produce or comprehend, depending on age.

However, vocabulary knowledge is socially based and dynamic. The vocabulary included on or excluded from the MCDI is also rooted in the social world, not the mind. Measuring which words children know from a predetermined list only tells researchers which words on that list children know or reported by their parents as knowing. Treating such information as important is a matter of epistemology—and standardized tests purposefully measure only one way of knowing in order to preserve white supremacy (Milner, 2012; Yosso, 2005). Further, not every caregiver is concerned with their child having a robust vocabulary, however that might be defined—my own mother told me she wasn’t (C. Figueroa, personal communication, 2021). Nevertheless, by not subscribing to the “right” kind of linguistic practices or ideologies, racialized families and communities are declared by white researchers to lack the tools to support their children. This cycle inevitably continues because there is a sense that “motherhood [and increasingly parenthood] is something to be endlessly worked on by academic research” (Allen & Spencer, 2022, p. 1183). And in order to “accelerate” language development, the modes of optimization keep shifting.

Even when racialized caregivers’ interactions with their child(ren) exhibit the characteristics of so-called “quality” input, it is never enough. Hart and Risley found, for example, that “the children in the welfare [i.e., low-income] families heard a prohibition twice as often as they heard affirmative feedback” (1999, p. 169). It is not the case that these caregivers failed to produce any affirmative feedback, which the researchers considered a marker of “quality” input, they did not use as much of this kind of language the researchers subjectively decided was “quality.” In such research, the socially constructed idea of “quality” is forever moving further down the line—an “imagined line” that Ofelia García and colleagues (2021) refer to as “ongoing coloniality” (p. 3). Not only is it hard to pin down what exactly constitutes “quality” linguistic input given the wide range of descriptions in the literature, but racialized caregivers are unlikely ever to hit the mark when the descriptions are embedded in coloniality and institutionalized racism.

The point that is too often missing in mainstream scientific discourse on language development is that research predicated on the so-called language gap puts racialized children and their families at risk by following a familiar recipe of deficit models: first, you identify a social problem, such as the lower rates of academic “success” among low-income children who are disproportionately racialized. Then, you conduct a study to find out how affluent and impoverished children differ in some way. Next, you identify some differences and define these as the cause of the social problem. Finally, you apply an intervention to “correct” the differences among the poor children (Valencia, 1997). While there has been a discursive shift in psycholinguistics and related fields from deficiency to what Boykin and Allen (2000) call a “proactive difference stance,” this does not mean that deficit thinking has been eliminated. Highlighting difference will always result in racialized children, not middle-class and upper-class white children, being Othered or even falsely labeled disabled (Annamma et al., 2013). Difference invites comparison, and locating differences often puts groups in opposition to each other (Else-Quest & Hyde, 2016). For example, proponents of the language gap perspective argue, “It is crucial to understand the source of these differences to design effective, evidence-based interventions” (Golinkoff et al., 2019, p. 1; emphasis added). However, the question I have is: If you really see them as differences and not deficits, why would you need to intervene at all? And why is it never the white kids who are made to change? In this way, researchers are responsible for further marginalizing racialized communities and undermining their agency (Milner, 2012). The shifting discourse from deficient to different, from quantity to “quality,” are ad hoc distinctions that function solely to uphold the status quo.

Intervening in the lives of racialized families to promote the use of “quality” linguistic input isn’t just unhelpful, it’s dehumanizing. As Ansgar Allen and Sarah Spencer point out, this focus on the role of parents, particularly mothers, “[commits them] to a permanent labor in which they are expected to better themselves as measured by the manifest language development of their children” (2022, p. 1183). Interventions promoted by researchers are paternalistic, colonizer prescriptions for parents to abandon their familial or individual child-rearing practices in favor of linguistic behaviors associated with white people in order to maintain white linguistic hegemony (e.g., Weber et al., 2017). Psycholinguists become agents of colonialism. Importantly, given the demographics of higher education, and especially psycholinguistics, where racialized scholars and students remain extremely underrepresented, the foundational problem of white nationalism is routinely ignored and raciolinguistic ideologies often go unchallenged even as white scholars build their careers by exploiting racialized communities.

As I (and many other scholars) have argued, “language gap” rhetoric generates inequality by selectively legitimizing linguistic behaviors associated with middle-class and upper-class white people as “quality,” while positioning language use by racialized communities as inherently deficient and in need of remediation. To be absolutely clear, there is no such thing as “quality” linguistic input. “Quality” is a value judgment, not an inherent characteristic of language. This conception only serves to reproduce inaccurate and deficit-based representations of racialized children and families. As it stands, researchers blatantly misinterpret racialized children’s academic performance and language development as deficient on the grounds that the linguistic input of their environments is not of sufficient “quality”—as they themselves define it—to nurture cognitive or intellectual growth. Imposing white linguistic norms on racialized communities fails to call out the underlying racism and colonial violence that undergird beliefs about linguistic deficiency in the first place.

It is a game that cannot be won. It is destroying to replace. One of the most honest descriptions of what an intervention would need to look like for children from racialized communities under a deficit perspective is from Hart and Risley: “An intervention must address not just a lack of knowledge or skill, but an entire general approach to experience” (2003, p. 9). Destroy. Replace. The institutional forces that worked to replace my dad’s Spanish with English destroyed my opportunity as a child to have a relationship with my dad in Spanish, his first language.

Individual racist beliefs or intentions aren’t necessary to further a deficit perspective, or to further racism more generally and to participate in a system that destroys to replace. I can’t presume to know the true intentions of each and every researcher, but even good intentions often divert attention from systemic issues. The “language gap” discourse serves to uphold the status quo and avoids politically divisive ideas and solutions—uncomfortable solutions that involve true paradigm shifts and the reallocation of power and resources (Wesley, 2021). Black feminist poet Audre Lorde (1984) pointed out that Black women “become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection” (p. 114). “Language gap” rhetoric works to colonize by maintaining white supremacy through situating whiteness and its associated linguistic behaviors as both materially and immaterially valuable. A paradigm shift involves interrogating the systems that force racialized people to adopt the linguistic behaviors of the white middle and upper classes for success in school and beyond. It also involves changing the way “success” is measured in the educational system. One small way to do so is to stop using vocabulary—socially dependent knowledge—as a measure of language and/or cognitive development and abilities because this only rewards the “normal” child who is the product of a white and middle- to upper-class upbringing.

A paradigm shift also involves critically examining why some scientific questions have been valued over others. Researchers must admit that science is not an objective endeavor. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), scientist, author, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, says of the state of science:

Getting scientists to consider the validity of Indigenous knowledge is like swimming upstream in cold, cold water. They’ve been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds toward theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough. Couple that with the unblinking assumption that science has cornered the market on truth and there’s not much room for discussion. (p. 160)

Scientists must challenge deeply held beliefs about the nature of “science” and the myth of “objectivity” (Dupree & Kraus, 2022). As it stands, many lack critical consciousness of the social positions they hold. Many racialized scholars within the field of linguistics have been told that their work engaging race is “not linguistics,” while the color-evasiveness of white researchers allows them to position themselves as “objective.”

Psycholinguists have inherited fields of inquiry, like psychology, that owe their beginnings to proving the genetic and cultural deficiency of racialized people, particularly Black people (Boykin & Allen, 2000; Winston, 2020). Further, generalizations about language development from white families of Western European descent are taken for granted as “normal” because members of the white middle and upper classes disproportionally write, review, and read scientific articles. Shifting away from a deficit framework, or a difference framework that is covertly deficit-based, will allow us to move beyond inaccurate and limiting descriptions of language and language development. Psycholinguists must begin to work within this knowledge to broaden our theories to include historical and present-day context because without acknowledging institutionalized racism, only the most egregious and/or superficial examples of racism are eradicated, if those (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Trawalter et al., 2020). Finally, we must reject easily digestible and simplistic descriptions of language development that are predicated on the behavior of a very narrow subset of human diversity.

A decolonized, anti-racist field of linguistics does not have room for “language gap” rhetoric. The gap metaphor is “one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary racism in U.S. schools” (Yosso, 2005, p. 75). Teachers and educators who consume research on the “language gap” can adopt deficit perspectives of racialized students and transfer them into the classroom milieu. Adair and colleagues (2017) found that teachers citing the “word gap” had lowered expectations for Latinx/e students. Those lowered expectations translated into classroom practice, such that Latinx/e students were not given learning opportunities that were agentive and promoted self-efficacy. These characteristics are valued in the school setting and serve as indicators of “ability” and “readiness.” Thus, the “language gap” discourse has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, reproducing inequities that it purports to challenge (Arnold & Faudree, 2019).

The “language gap” discourse is pervasive in psycholinguistics and adjacent fields, as well as public discourse, and bridging the gap remains of utmost importance to many researchers. It is time to stop searching for gaps and scrutinize the systems that consistently position racialized children as deficient and/or disabled. If research is grounded in the idea that “quality” is an inherent characteristic of language rather than a social construct meant to uphold white supremacy, that work is complicit in the perpetuation of a deficit view of the language use of racialized communities.

What we “know” about child language development is intrinsically linked to who conducted the research, what research methodologies and instruments were used, and the larger system under which the research is published and disseminated (Syed et al., 2018). Under the current model, the types of research questions and topics that are valued are constructing an inaccurate view of language and language development. Respecting diverse standpoints, like mine, as legitimate, would allow racially offensive ideas to be understood as such so they can then be challenged. To dismiss the experiences and epistemologies of racialized researchers as “not scientific” or “too emotional” is essentially promoting epistemic racism in (psycho)linguistics (Figueroa, 2022). The idea that parents could manipulate the linguistic input their child is exposed to in a way that would set them up for “success” in academia and beyond is ridiculous when examined critically from my standpoint.

Countering linguistic and epistemic racism will take enormous effort—effort that racialized people have been undertaking since settler-colonialism first arrived in the Americas. We cannot dismiss the reality that these inequities have been accepted uncritically since this country’s beginnings and that they are deeply embedded in academic institutions and disciplines. Mainstream science will never interrupt the cycle of harm perpetuated by white supremacy because to do so would require a true paradigm shift and the equitable reallocation of social power (Leonard, 2021). A true paradigm shift would mean that people like me would no longer read offensive descriptions of ourselves in so-called scientific papers. It is long past time to acknowledge the racist and colonial foundation that so many place beneath their science.