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Testifying While Black: An Experimental Study of Court Reporter Accuracy in Transcription of African American English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Taylor Jones ,
Jessica Rose Kalbfeld ,
Ryan Hancock  and
Robin Clark
Taylor Jones*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Jessica Rose Kalbfeld*
Affiliation:
New York University
Ryan Hancock*
Affiliation:
Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity
Robin Clark*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
*
[tayjones@sas.upenn.edu]
[jessie.kalbfeld@nyu.edu]
[rhancock@wwdlaw.com]
[rclark@sas.upenn.edu]
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Abstract

Court reporters are certified at either 95% or 98% accuracy, depending on their certifying organization; however, the measure of accuracy is not one that evaluates their ability to transcribe nonstandard dialects. Here, we demonstrate that Philadelphia court reporters consistently fail to meet this level of transcription accuracy when confronted with mundane examples of spoken African American English (AAE). Furthermore, we show that they often cannot demonstrate understanding of what is being said. We show that the different morphosyntax of AAE, the different phonological patterns of AAE, and the different accents in Philadelphia related to residential segregation all conspire to produce transcriptions that not only are inaccurate, but also change the official record of who performed what actions under which circumstances, with potentially dramatic legal repercussions for everyday speakers of AAE.

Keywords

African American Englishcomprehensioncriminal justiceinequality

Information

Type
Language and Public Policy
Information
Language , Volume 95 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. e216 - e252
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

The authors wish to thank Jane Margulies Kalbfeld for calling and insisting we drop everything and turn on the TV to see what was happening during the Zimmerman trial, and we wish to thank Rachel Jeantel, who experienced egregious mistreatment we hope this research will alleviate for others. We owe a debt of gratitude to John Rickford (and Sharese King), who encouraged us to pursue this quantitative approach while they pursued a qualitative approach to the same problem. We are grateful to John Baugh and Arthur Spears for their insightful and important feedback during the review process. We wish to thank Walt Wolfram, Christopher Hall, Curtis Wright, Satish Robertson, Murda, T-Mac, and Mike Lee, as well as all of the anonymous speakers who lent their voices to this project. We wish to thank Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity and the individuals within the Philadelphia court system who gave us access to the court reporters and the space to perform the study, as well as the participants in the pilot study. This article is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No: DGE 1342536. Finally, we would like to thank the University of Pennsylvania for the Research Opportunity Grant that made this research possible.

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