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User:Stepheny

I'm in my 3rd year after taking a year off to travel. Currently I am working on a double major in Psychology and Spanish at Dalhousie University. I am taking psycholoinguistics because I would like to learn more about language more specifically how people with learning disabilities are affected. I also hope to learn more about biligualism in this class.

January 17, 2011- Blog #1

 * What is language? A short question that sounds relitively simple, a few words should be sufficient to answer this question, right? I mean our lives revolve around language it should be easy enough to explain, yet a few of these short worded questions have lead to a 604 page textbook, a professor and lectures to teach our class about language. A simple question I think not! Concepts dictated by Freud, Pavlov, and Piaget with respect to language are being taught to us in PSYC 3190. We are being taught how past ideologies have lead us to our current beliefs so our generation does not waste any time repeating that which has already been done in past research. Since today's society seems to about advancement, the way this class is being taught is sure to spark specific interests, and new innovative ideas among the students and from there the possibilities are endless. This will give the future generations something new to talk about. This class is teaching many students how to use a new part of the internet and is allowing us to help our fellow students as well as those who want to be more educated about psycholinguistics. It is nice to do something different in class instead of cramming for an exam just to forget it after the term is over. I believe that the class format for PSYC3190 is bringing something new to the table and is allowing us to use our knowledge of the topics interactively and over the course of the semester so the new information we are learning will become ingrained instead of just dissipating. As students we have been to a lecture or two and professors that throw in a few laugh, know their stuff and can present it well tend to have more students attend class which seems to be the current theme of this class even with easy access to podcasts and online notes. Professors that have interactive type learning (ie.practices quizzes, pictures, videos, short answer questions or give examples such as the stroop task) are allowing students to relate, testing their knowledge, not their ability to do narrow MC exam questions down to two answers and then play multiple guess. I believe reading other students works in this course may accually be a great way of learning, since all students know the ways in which they and their friends learn best. Pictures, information and explanations we can relate to, not old television soap characters that we have never even heard of may be a great form of teaching. We will have to wait and see! In the mean time I leave you with this question: What is language? At the end of this course I expect to be able to answer this question with a relatively clear answer.
 * Progess on my topic: I attemped to use some of the design techniques available when editing wiki pages, designing tables and inserting photos.

January 24, 2011- Blog #2

 * During lecture the example that was given where we had to say spin and pin really hit home. I realized how intricate language actually is. As a kid I would have told you the words were basically the same because they rhyme and have very similar spelling. After say the two words I feel like language is way more complex then I originally thought and from now on I will think differently. I look forward to more eye opening experiences in this class and within the readings. I found it appauling when I learned that an ASL dictionary was nonexistent until 1960 when it was developed by Stokoe. I have always believe any form of communicating is a language and growing up I understood the need for sign language. I feel as a society we have grown so much and it makes me happy that new generations are able to recognized ASL as a langauge and have the resources available if they want to learn more. It is not that long ago that it was unavailable for others to learn and I feel that our class project is a step in the correct direction. Not unlike the changes made in 1960, our project is make people aware and give them the ability to be educated if they so desire. Thinking about the lecture material I now wonder how does a child learn a language? It seems to come easily considering all the elements that are involved in speach that go beyond the grammar that children are taught in school.

January 31, 2011- Blog #3

 * During Wednesdays class we learned that chinchillas have categorical perception of the English phonemes which I thought was an interesting addition to the lecture. The McGurk Effect example was also an interesting touch. The fact that the acoustic info was BAH and the visual info (a mouth saying) GAH lead to the class believing that the man was saying DAH was interesting. I enjoy these examples because it shows students that although their first language my be English they still have a lot to learn because our brain can be tricked into thinking something completely different than what is actually being presented to us. I think it would be neat to learn more about these concepts so that you could train yourself to pay closer attention to the info that is actually being given. In class we talked about boundaries and how familiarity with a language helps distinguish where a word starts and ends in a spoken sentence. I was unaware of the difficulty that deaf people had when learning to read. I was shocked at how low the average reading level (grade 4) was in deaf adults. My interest was sparked by the statistics on deaf adults and I will be sure to look up more information on this topic to cure my curiosity. I would like to find out more about why there is such difficulty for these individuals and if there are anyways to teaching reading in a more effective way.

 * Topic:Teaching Reading- I was wondering if you could give me feedback on my topic outline I was given an extension because I did not receive the articles on teaching until the day it was due. Thank you

February 7, 2011- Blog #4
Growning up in a english speaking family sentences such as the following should seem fairly simple: The general rule in this case is as follows, because it happened in the past you add the morpheme -ed to the word walk, the person that did the action is not relevent as it is in synthetic languages like French or Spanish. Below is the Spanish equivalent to the above sentences. In languages like Spanish the word "caminar" meaning to walk in english, changes and is dependent on who the verb is refering to and sometimes an alternate ending is added with respect to the noun, which seems to be more complex than the english language. So why is english known as one of the most difficult language to learn compared to others, if the previous examples are true? If you consider the plural of box which is boxes the obviously the plural of ox is oxes. That is not the case though, the plural is actually oxen. Oxe is not the only irregular word in english language which is why I think english can be a difficult language to learn. There seem to be far more exceptions to rules and lots of irregular tenses compared to Spanish. There could have been a man outside but now there are a bunch of men. Similarly my friend's child could have went outside to play with the other children. A boy may have hit a boy last night or he may plan to hit his sister for stealing his toy. The english sentences in the first paragraph are indead simple because walk follows a regular pattern. I believe the difficulty in learning the english language is that many words do not conform to the normal morphemes such as -s, -ing or -ed. On another topic during Mondays class I began to wonder who are the special individuals that get to add and remove words from the dictionary. I can see a difference today between my grandparents generation and mine and the need for new words. Obviously I know what tapes, a desktop computer and A tracks are but when they came out with Ipod, or laptop, obviously needed to be given a name and therefore needed to be placed in the dictionary. I feel like the english language is evolving and the texting generation has created a lot of short forms before T9 was available. Does the majority population actually dictates what goes into the dictionary based on norms? Is there a small group of people who decide? Will we begin to see words such as ain't, dragged instead of drug, twitter, and facebook in the english dictionary one day if people continue to say them or will they just continue to be slang terms?
 * I walked to class
 * You walked to class
 * He/She walked to class
 * We walked to class
 * They walked to class
 * Yo caminé a clase
 * Tu caminaste a clase
 * El/Ella caminó a clase.
 * Nosotros caminamos a clase.
 * (Vostros caminasteis a clase) Used in Spain roughly translates to you guys walked to clase (used when talking to a group of people)
 * Ellos caminaron a clase.

February 14, 2011- Blog #5

 * I found fridays class particularly interesting with regards to the IBM computer Watson. I had no idea that this machine existed but I plan to watch Jeapardy this week. I am amazed that a computer is this advanced but I also enjoyed the parts that were showed in the video where Watson kept answering wrong. Even though technology is advancing it shows that it's not perfect especially with respect to jokes and puns. This is one thing I have found people who are learning a language strive for: the ability to understand not only the standard language but the slang, puns and jokes that involve almost another category of language. I wonder if IBM had to deal with psycholinguists or vis vera inorder to better understand how syntax works. Will Watson help linguists to perfect syntax?
 * The example: The old man the boat. Was a neat additive to the lecture. English is my first language and at first I did not think it was a sentence until Aaron said the sentence aloud. Does practice of examples such as the one above lead a person to understand grammar better than those that don't or is it related to what one learns in grammar class in elementary school?
 * In relation to Chomsky and his idea that language is the structure of the human mind. The examples given in class made me question why it is so hard to remember the sentences when the cognitive sentence structure was different from the norm. Is it hard because our working memory is not programmed to work in this way? It seems like one needs to decode the sentence in order to understand it.

February 28, 2011- Blog #6
The lecture I found the most interesting this week was the lecture on discourse. The examples in both the lecture and the textbook showed that causal inferences can be made depending on how related the material is to each other. An example that the text used was Tony's friend suddenly pushed him into a pond. He walked home, soaking wet, to changes his clothes. Most people would infer that it was Tony that walked home wet but we don't know it could have been his friend but because Tony was pushed into the pond, it makes sence that he would be wet and have to walk home soaking wet to change his clothes. Examples like this make readers a lot more aware when they are reading. It makes me wonder that when I am finished reading a novel how much external information did I infer but was not really in the text I read at all. The research example Aaron gave in class about the Disneyland trip was quite interesting to me because the last couple lectures in my forensic psychology class have shown how reliable peoples memories are (not very good). In my forensic psychology class we were told to remember a list that went something like this(try to remember these while reading them after you have read them all, then write as many of them down as you can): The whole class was asked to write down what they remember and then we were asked how many words they had remembered and then were ask who had wrote needle. Over half of the class had wrote needle down (did you?) and truely thought that it had been in the list although it was not one of the words. Looking back on the words made me wonder how do humans organize our memories. From the words the class was given most of us must have organized the words around a central theme possibly needle as a strategy to help ourselves remember the majority of the words. The Disneyland example also relates to this because individuals were told a story about seeing bugs bunny and the next time were asked what happened during there trip and most said that they had seen bugs bunny although that was clearly not the case because he would not be found in Disneyland. They clearly had a false memory of what had occured. On little activities such as these we learn how bad our memories can be which should make everyone take a step back. In court we rely on a persons memory, in test we rely on our memory of what we read or think we read, how much of our memories are false and how many of them are true? Will there come a day where tests or machines can tell us how accurate our memories are?
 * thread, pin, eye, sewing, sharp, point, prick, thimble, haystack, thorn, hurt, injection, syringe, cloth and knitting (now write down as many words as you can remember)

March 7, 2011- Blog #7

 * I was surprised that at 6 months old an infant is sensitive to pitch and it's not until 5 to 7 years of age that kids develop their sensitivity to music. I was also surprised that the similarities between music and language. The idea that grammar is equal to the way notes and chords are combined, and phonemes are relitive to notes in music. I am now left wondering are there any other everyday human and non human actions that are similar to each other? Is there similarities between math, clucking, a dogs bark, a cats meow or baby babble to music or language? It amazed me that an individual could be unable to hear the difference in pitch, yet another topic I failed to think about prior to this course!
 * During the lecture this past Friday Dr. Newman gave an interesting example about "O" I was surprised by the knowledge that in general people are faster to read the letter O than to describe it as a picture. This example as well as the Stroop task tells us different things about how we access meaning. The picture naming task in the book is also a great example because it shows that distractor word (if similar in meaning) inhibits the activation of the word, in other words if the target word was sheep and the distractor word was goat there would be more of a delay then if the distractor word was house. These models tell us that the way we process information may come in different forms, in some tasks one may access the material semantically and others may be more phonological. Curiousity has been spark thus many studies are being conducted to see how humans access information. One day will scientist be able to pin point connections between tasks such as the above and the way the brain is working to output an answer? If this ever becomes possible the scientific world will still have other unanswered questions, I guess it's what make the world go round.

March 14, 2011- Blog #8

 * Does society determine the meaning of gestures (ie. In western culture: waving your hand to say goodbye to someone, shaking hands to greet someone, or giving the finger) or do these gestures get passed down from generation to generation, culture to culture? Why is it that a friendly gestures in one culture are offensive in another? While listening to the lecture I decided that gestures can indeed enhances communication. I'm not sure of the complete context but I remember someone telling me that people are curious creatures and that if I was to walk down a crowded hallway and point to somewhere on the ceiling people would look up to where I was pointing, you did not need to say anything, just point and people would take an interest and turn their heads to sneak a peek and be confused when they did not encounter anything out of the ordinary. Try it it is really humourous! I believe that the pointing example illustrates that dietic gesturing(ie. pointing) as well as other types of gestures can aid in maintaining the attention of the listener. From the lectures I decided that gestures really do enhance communication. A fisherman saying, "I caught a huge fish" or a guy who got punched the night before saying, "the guy at the bar last night who gave me this shinner was a giant" indeed have meaning but if the speaker is to include a hand motion of how big something was it not only enhances the meaning but sparks the interest of the listener. I concept I found interesting was the idea of talking on the phone to a friend and continuing to gesture even though the person on the other end wont see you. It makes a person wonder if we gesture to aid us in talkign and help ourselfs organize our thoughts or it we gesture strictly to beneift others and are just accustom to gesture we continue to do it while on the phone.
 * Aaron mentioned that a persons working memory has a lot to do with whether an individual is able to organize their thoughts which can be beniefical when writing papers. I don't know how I feel about this concept because I believe people can be trained to write essays properly and trained to remember things. It may be true that people that have better working memory in generally are able to organise there thoughts better but I still think you can train an individual to organize their thoughts. Here is a youtube video on improving memory by organizing thoughts that you may find interesting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhZcHoU-QR8

March 21, 2011- Blog #9
I was particularly interested in the lecture on pidgins and creoles and how the creoles develop grammar without their parents having this knowledge. I wondered if this means that our language develops in our brains and does not solely develop from what we learn from our teachers? I remember the case of Genie who did not have any teachers until later in life and still was unable to completely adjust, this led me to believe that the brain and teachers both responsible for learning at certain stages in our development. I think this is a very neat concept that I believe relates to many experiences I have had as a child and why the world has continued developing up to this point. As a child I learned how to play chess and many other games from my Dad and after a couple months my skills had become superior to his. The media now says that University and college are the "new" grade 12 diploma, and in order to get a job in the future it will be much more likely that an individual will need more education. It appears that all around us the majority of people are becoming more educated than their parents. Maybe this is the idea that because we learn so much from them we do not have to make as many mistakes as they did and thus existing knowledge is being passed down from generation to generation. Thus like the creoles, individuals in our society have the ability to add to their existing knowledge learned from their parents and other close to them without learning "the hard way" like they did. The second topic that raised some questions for me was Nicaraguan sign language. I remember as a child my parents friends had visited with their children from Mexico (whom did not speak english). They stayed for a week and although there was a language barrior we were able to communicate through gestures and found ways around the barrior. To play a game of frizbee we found a frizbee, which they had seen before and because the concept was the same in both our cultures (catch and throw the frizbee) we were able to play a game together. During this lecture I decided that gesturing (although it was debated earlier about whether or not it was beneifical to the listener or the speaker) can help with communication barriors and I feel that is what the deaf students in the Nicaraguan school used to communicate at first which developed into a language. I find it unreal that there are still new languages being formed in our society today!

March 28, 2011- Blog #10
I was always skeptical about the idea that an individual could learn new languages and aquire the accents of those languages at an older age. The youtube video on language hacking showed me anything is possible and has impacted me in a way that makes me want to learn more then just three languages. I am currently learning Spanish and started when I was 18, I have always questioned whether or not I would be able to be fluent and what exactly it meant to be fluent. Does fluent mean you can get by in a foreign country? Are you able to have an accent from your first language or must you carry and accent from the language you are speaking to be fluent? Can you speak a language fluently without being able to write it? All these questions are crossing my mind but I suppose that fluency in a lanuage depends who you talk to. I found it particularly interesting that there may not be a critical period for learning languages but there may be a relationship between the language (ie. If your first language was English it would be easier to learn German than Korean because German and English are similar in structure compared to Korean and English where one is a symbolic language). I was also surprised about the few disadvantages that arise to children who grown up learning a second language and the multiple beniefts that went along with it. I have always supported learning a new language and had firsthand experience helping children learn English as their second language, when I was in Spain, working as a nanny. English being my first and theirs being Spanish, I found the three children I looked after to be very fluent in English and they also held an american accent when they spoke English, which I believe came from listening and talking with their other Canadian nannies before my arrival. The children were between 7 and 9 years old and spoke English very well (fluently in my opinion), they could also write everyday words such as pen, book, shoe but they could not write a proper sentence in English. I found this concept very strange but understandable, since they had grown up talking English and Spanish and only learning the basics in English at school. Everyday I witnessed them code switching because as soon as their parents arrived home they would automatically switch to Spanish, some of the reason being that they were shy to speak English with their parents and some because they have always spoke to their parents in Spanish.

April 4, 2011- Blog #11
The first debate on Ebonics was interesting to say the least. I had no idea what to expect as I have never done a debate in class before. I felt both teams were prepared but they were unclear about some important factors. Both sides had points that were of benefit to them but I feel like my opinion on the matter had a stronger impact than point they made during their debate. When the idea of bilinguialism was brought up it lead me to a perspective I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I don't know that Ebonics can be compared to English and French per se but surely it should be considered a language. Some people may say it is a waste of time to learn a language that is not used in other communities but to these communities it may give them more of a sense of identity and an ability to relate to others with in the community. I'm not sure that teachers should teach the language in the schools but they should certainly recognize it as a language. For me I feel as though Ebonics can be related similarly to England English and Canadian English or even Irish English. I have done a bit of travelling and I must say that I had a hard time understanding individuals from Scotland. Although they spoke English and my first language is English I could not understand most words they were saying because of the speed at which they were talking. Similarly when I was in England I was unaware of the words cue, and had never heard anyone say rubbish before. I continually thought to myself during my travels, "wow, I do not know as much as I think I know about the english language". This for me is how I think of Ebonics, although I would consider it a minority language that people use to communicate. I do not see the problem with Ebonics with respect to it being taught in school, I personally think it should not be, for the simple reason that if one feels they should know the language they can use it at home. They should be considered bilingual and Ebonics should be considered a language and children should not scolded for mixing up two languages. During the debate on cochlear implants I quite enjoyed the comparison of bilingualism as well. It does indeed make sence that although the children may not need to know ASL it can never hurt because if something does go wrong with the implants the individual with the hearing impairment still has an alternative way to speak to others if need be. When Aaron let us listen to the different frequencies of a cochlear implant, I was really surprised at what one actually hears. We can send people to space but people who have trouble hearing have to deal with a BandAid method? Doesn't seem fair to me. I always assumed that when my grandad had his hearing aid in that he could hear everything perfectly well, this is apparently not the case. I was also really surprised at how terrible music sounds through a cochlear implant. I know I surely would never want to listen to music for leasure like I do now. I wonder how long it will be until this technology advances to a new level, will cochlear implants become a thing of the past anytime soon and be replaced by wireless communication systems like other advancing technologies? We can only wait...

title: User:Stepheny


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User:AngelaTaylor

I am a 4th year Neuroscience student at Dalhousie University, Halifax NS.

Blog Post 1

I am extremely enjoying this class. I liked the material presented this week in regards to the brain. I found that the information was helpful in understanding the material in general, but I also found that it was not an overwhelming amount of "Brain Stuff." I enjoyed the presentation about the imaging techniques. I found that after first year and the quick introduction we are given to these techniques, they are always mentioned in classes, but never really explained as to why, or how they are related to the material. I found it nice that the techniques were not only explained but quickly related to how they are used in this field.

As a small aside, I just wanted to comment about the attendance in this class. I was extremely surprised that after first class, when it was explained that all the lectures are posted and podcasted online, that attendance in the class did not decrease dramatically. Also, I expected this to occur as there was not separate mark for attendance. I believed that many students would stop coming to class. Instead this did not occur in Psycholinguistics, but did occur in another class in which attendance is mandatory and a part of the class mark.

In general, my thought of the first week of class are pleasant, and I am happy with the way this class is progressing. The material is engaging and interesting. I find that my attention is on the material at all times.

Blog Post 2

Language is something that majority of the population uses on a daily basis without thinking about it's nature or form. Language is something that, unless you have a specific need to, you may pass your entire life without ever having to think about it.

Today Professor Newman talked about how Phonological Rules are part of the speakers' implicit knowledge, and that even as we are beginning to develop language, we already understand that there are certain constraints with combinations of phonemes. Even as an early speaker, children know that the sounds NRGL do not go together and do not start words. My question in regards to this would be, How are we able to decide that these rules are implicit? Does that mean that we are born knowing that certain sounds do not belong together? Personally, Im not sure what to agree with, as children are born prepared to speak any sounds produced by humans, but eventually, they only speak the sounds of their language. The other side of this idea would be that, as children are being exposed to language, perhaps they are learning the patterns that they hear around them. Perhaps children are not born with these implicit rules, but learn them quickly before they are able to speak.

Blog Post 3

Children who learn languages with a better grapheme-phoneme-correspondence seem to have better phonological awareness. This can be seen in languages such as Turkish and Italian. Do these children have an advantage when they learn a second language that has a different grapheme to phoneme correspondence? As these children already have a great phonological awareness, are they better prepared to learn new word-sound associations seen in other languages. Is it also possible that having certain languages as a primary language make learning other languages harder? This seems to be shown with the children who learned chinese as a locographic language. These children do not learn phonological awareness because this is not a part of their language. This may be seen as a disadvantage when learning a language that requires high phonological awareness to learn it. Do children who learn certain languages have certain advantages or disadvantages when learning a second language based on the nature of their first language?

Blog Post 4

Monday's lecture on morphology started me thinking about a study I had done in the past through the psych department. The premise of the study was to sit and watch different strings of words. Each string of words was repeated many times and all were connected by the same premise. For example, one string of words had a negative connotation well another string had a positive connotation. One string of words was neutral. As the study was progressing, all the participant was asked to do was to focus on the words. They were not asked to remember or repeat them, just watch them as they flashed on the screen. While I was participating, I was wondering what type of task I would be asked to complete at the end of the focusing phase of the study. I was thinking about how the researcher would ask me to relate or remember the words. This led me to think of meaning of words and such. In the end, all that was asked was whether you liked or did not like the word. The idea was that the words that had been shown over and over again would be liked more than new words that were shown in the testing phase. In the context of this lecture, I was wondering how words are given meaning and how they are remembered.

Blog Post 5

Friday's lecture was about sentence processing and syntax. The lecture started off talking about the new computer named Watson. I found this information very interesting as it shows a practical application of the study of language. This type of technology could be extremely useful in the medical field as it could lead to quick and accurate diagnoses just by listening to a patient talk about their symptoms. The lecture then went on to talk about some theories regarding grammar, syntax and the rules for combining words into sentences. There is a theory called Universal Grammar that states that some aspects of language are hard-wired into the brain and do not need to be taught. Although this may be true, there are some things that cannot be hard-wired into the brain. Assuming that the computer was programmed with these theories in mind, how would it be able to understand some of the things that take experience and adaptation for humans to understand. For example, would the computer be able to understand someone who was asking a question while stuttering? Is the computer able to understand non-native language speakers who may have extremely thick accents?

Blog Post 6

Today's lecture was about discourse. The topic of discourse and language was closely related to the idea of memories and making inferences. When you talk with someone, you are engaged in a type of discourse. During the span of a conversation, you are required to use your short term memory as well as your past ideas and experiences to relate to the topic at hand. As conversation does not have very good visual component, a person must use their own schemas to create mental representations of the conversation. I really enjoyed how this was shown in the story example about Donald. Stories are also a type of discourse. We were read a short story about Donald and a date that he had with his third wife and then were asked a few questions relating to the story. The story itself was very vague without many details, but the questions asked about the details. Based on personal experiences, the details were inferred and the questions could be answered with a fair amount of confidence. The story named the restaurant as Mario's and it was believed that the reader would relate this to an italian restaurant and a fancy dinner with all the other hints given in the story. Personally, I know of a restaurant named Mario's and it gives me a very different type of idea than the story was aiming for. I have a different schema for this idea. If I have a different schema for this one idea, other people must have other schemas for the same idea. It seems to me that with all these different ideas, it would be difficult for a large group of people to all come to the same conclusion.

Blog Post 7

Today's lecture was about speech production. The big question relating to this topic is how do we get from thought to speech. Professor Newman talked about a study in which people were asked to read a list of words, then name a list of pictures. It was found that naming the pictures took longer then reading the list of words. It is believed that this happens because of the delay that it takes in the brain to retrieve the name for the picture and then to say that name. This delay does not occur when a list of words is just read. In general, there it takes 200 ms longer to name a picture than read a word. If a person has a reading problem, such as a stutter, that causes them to slow their reading, would they show a similar time in both the reading and naming tasks? These people may show a slower time when it comes to reading the word list due to their reading problem, but would this delay be present when they name a picture?

Blog Post 8

This past week contained lectures that I found extremely interesting. In particular, I especially enjoyed the lecture about gestures. I found the little demonstration at the beginning very interesting, as I had never thought of gestures being a part of speech before and they clearly were. I had never thought of gestures as being important in communication, just as an additive to supplement communication, but after this lecture, I can easily see the purpose of gestures in communication. I also enjoyed the break-down of the types of gestures, as I had not known there to be such a long list of different types of gestures. After this lecture, I started to look at people when they talked and did indeed notice that people gestured a lot while they talked. It got me to thinking about how blind or deaf people might gesture while speaking. I think that there would be some type of difference between these two groups of people, but I am unsure of what they might be. Would they show only certain types of gestures, or perhaps would they be missing certain types?

Blog Post 9

I really enjoyed today's class about the development of language. I find this topic very interesting, perhaps the best parts of the class. I really enjoyed the parts of the lecture that talked about how babies are able to categorize things at a very early age. They are able to categorize languages, novel phonemes and stress patterns and more, all at different ages. I find this remarkable, as babies are not even able to talk at this point. I understand completely, that these skills grow on each other and that the baby adds to a prior skill to gain a new one. What I find hard to understand is how the babies are able to make any distinctions in the first place. Especially when some of the things that babies are able to differentiate easily are things that I must take time and listen to repeatedly to hear the difference. Children are even sensitive to voice onset time changes and phoneme changes, but how are they able to identify these differences in the first place. Their perception is extremely great!

Blog Post 10

The statistics mentioned in class today surprised me greatly. I have been hearing about aphasia a long time, but it was surprising to hear that so many people have this condition. Over 15 000 new cases of this condition are seen each year but it is not something that people talk about or hear about everyday. This disorder seems to have an unspoken tendency but is prevalent in society. The fact that this condition is not talked about often may be due to the fact that the people who have it are not able to advocate for the disorder themselves. These people are not able to communicate and it affects their everyday life. The video of the couple is a great example of how aphasia affected the man's speech. He was able to comprehend much of what his wife was saying, but he had difficulty expressing his thoughts. As you could imagine, a person with aphasia would not be able to take as active a role in daily life as before they had aphasia. These people have difficulty living their own daily lives, so it may be a stretch for them to teach the public about the disease. Other things that can be affected by aphasia is their reading an writing abilities. Some people who have aphasia are able to speak very fluently, but what they say does not make sense. People with this condition would not be able to share their experiences with other people. The person may feel like they are explaining themselves well, when in fact, for the people listening, they are not making sense at all. This part of the condition may add to the fact that this condition is not known about or spoken about in everyday life. Some people are able to gain some improvement if they receive therapy early. They may be able to have some of their reading, writing and speaking skills recover after therapy, but this recovery differs in each patient.

Overall, this class, with the guest speaker, was a great addition to the lectures by Dr. Newman. I enjoyed how specific the lecture was and the detail that was in the lecture.

Blog post 11

Today's class was a debate that involved the topic of whether Ebonics should be taught as the primary language of instruction in a community in which the majority of people speak the minority language. The against group stated that learning a second language will help provide a feeling of achievement and promote a greater sense of self-esteem in these individuals. Although I plan on using a different language as an example, I feel like this relates to this particular issue. There have been studies done between French and English speaking students and how the language of instruction affects their grades. English children who enter a french immersion school tend to get grades that are much lower than they would have, had they gone to an english school. Eventually, if the children stick with the French school, they will achieve better grades and have an increased IQ, but few students complete their education in a different language. When children enter the french school, they start achieving grades that are low, thereby lowering there self-esteems. This may cause them to leave the school and transfer to an English school, they still have this feeling of lower self-esteem and may fall into a pattern of underachievement as they are not used to getting good grades. Based on their previous lower grades, why would they work harder to get better grades now just cause they understand the language better. They have already been conditioned not to get the good grades.

By using this argument, I would like to say that sometimes learning a second language in school is not the best idea, and can harm the students.

Blog post 12

I would like to use this blog post to talk about my experience of preparing and presenting my first debate. I really enjoyed the format of the debate and the structure and instruction that the groups were given. I feel that this made all the presentations better as there was not a lot of wiggle room to mess around with. This allowed for the majority of presentations to be well prepared, well-rehearsed and well researched.

I do not personally enjoy working in groups as you are not able to fully control the situation, but I found, with this particular group and project, that was not a large issue. Of course there were still issues and problems that arose, but they seem to be handled relatively well. The members of our group were extremely motivated to do well. I found it difficult to relinquish the control of the project sometimes but we found a way to make it work. Quite often, I feel that other people are not able to complete a project as well as I believe that I can, but the collaboration of the members of the group worked out really well.

It was also nice to have within our group, a couple of people who related to the topic very well. Some of us were using English as a second language, while others were trying to learn other languages as second languages. Being able to relate to the topic allowed us to form opinions easily. This works well in a debate as you are trying to sway others to your point of view. If you believe in what you are arguing, people will see that and be more apt to change their opinions as well.

Overall, I thought this project was an excellent way to wrap up the school year and bring the class to a close. Not only was it fun, it was informative and allowed for a very hands on approach to the topics that we had previously learned. I enjoyed the process a lot and am very pleased with how the presentation ended.

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January 13, 2011
Yesterday in class we discussed the concept of language without thought. It's an intriguing topic to think about because it seems like most of our thoughts revolve around words and that when we privately think, (I know I do at least) we tend to think in words. It seems like language is so ingrained into us, but is it really? An interesting point was brought up in class in that people are unable to describe everything with language, like the senses. We can ascribe certain labels, and categories to these senses but in reality the labels we create are superficial and are unable to relate the complete physical experience. When we try to describe how something tastes we tend to describe it as being "-like", i.e. lemon-like. It's hard to actually describe what's physically happening, when you taste something salty you don't say that "the sodium ions from this compound activate the ion channels on my tongue in order to provide a salty sensation," instead you say, "Oh, that's salty.". Language is interesting because it's something that we attribute a lot of faith onto, we use it for communicating and for most aspects of our life. Language seems so natural and ingrained into human beings, but when you think about language you realize it's actually quite a large constraint. Language is a way to anchor arbitrary labels onto things that we interact with, and the labels that we provide don't fully relate or provide an accurate description of the item. An apple is an apple, but is an apple really an apple? Would a better name for an apple be "a round biodegradable food item which smells sweet which can be small, medium, or large, and can be red, green, or yellow, that acts as the edible seed of an apple tree which is then eaten either raw or cooked by animals and humans, providing either a sweet, sweet-sour, or slightly sour taste which can have a gritty or smooth texture depending on ripeness"? Clearly that's a hassle to say, let alone try and think about but I think it proves the point that the word apple really has no relation to what the physical experience of an apple is.

Language is amazing in that it seems to have given humans enormous capabilities for thinking, socializing, and organizing the world but it has limitations. Language is vague, and requires interpretation in order to have the proper sentiments conveyed. It's clumsy and unable to accurate portray the emotions behind the words. A good example is text messaging, because this is a time where the only available means of interaction are words. The normal cues that are involved in a conversation aren't present, so it's easy to misinterpret meanings when you can't see the other's facial expressions, or hear their tone. I think that when put into that context, it becomes obvious that we are capable of thinking without language, but we cannot have meaningful language without the necessary social cues. When you strip language of the mental implications and emotions behind the words, as well as the social cues, you're left with something meaningless.

 * "...They were only ingenious half-humans, little better than savages; all living shut off from one another, with only clumsy words to link them. Often they were shut off still more by different languages, and different beliefs. Some of them could think individually, but they had to remain individuals. Emotions they could sometimes share, but they could not think collectively. When their emotions were primitive they could get along all right, as the animals can; but the more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus." - Wyndham, 1955, pg. 156.

References

January 21, 2011
Today in Psycholinguistics we discussed sign language. It was interesting to learn more about sign language because as an individual who is not deaf, learning about the different constraints in sign language was really neat. The constraints were orientation, movement, location, and hand-shape. These four factors can create and convey such a wide variety of words/meanings that it was really interesting to see. I know for instance that in Western culture, holding up your index and middle finger (apart) while your other fingers are closed is the "peace" sign. However, in other cultures this sign can have various meanings. For instance, it can be used to signify victory if the palm faces outward, but if the palm faces inward in the United Kingdom, than it has an entirely different meaning. It's interesting to see how these signs can vary from country to country, or culture to culture and it's easy to understand why different countries evolved different sign languages.

Sign language has been shown to activate areas in the brain similar to language activation within the left hemisphere of the brain. . However, it has also been shown that there is right hemisphere activation when deaf individuals process language, which is also seen in non-deaf individuals. This is due to the fact that sign language can interpret prosody, and even without prosody there is still right hemisphere activation. It would appear that when examining the fMRI data between native English speakers and BSL (British Sign Language) speakers, brain activation of the "core language system" is seen in both groups. This was really cool to read about because the study demonstrates how sign language activates the same core language components that are involved for people who are not deaf. When I first thought about it, it seemed like sign-language should activate different areas within the brain from regular language use in non-deaf individuals, but when I thought about it further it actually makes sense why it does activate the same pathways. Language is language given any context. For example, different languages have different phonemes from English but it still activates the same language areas within the brain. So while one language may not be necessarily spoken or heard, it doesn't mean that it's not involved in the same neural pathways. Another really cool thing from the study was that within BSL speakers, the auditory cortices and areas that surround the superior temporal gyrus were still activated (normally activated by hearing).

One fad that seems to be very popular lately is to teach sign language to babies who are not deaf. It's really interesting that children who are typically not yet speaking can grasp the concept of using sign language to communicate desires. This seems like it would be highly useful for parents in order to communicate with their babies. One paper discusses that infants are able to grasp sign language because they are born with a sensitivity towards rhythmic patterns, as well as have a capacity to use these patterns. I'd like to find some more research at some point though that discusses why infants are able to pick up on sign language faster than spoken language, both of which are considered innate abilities of babies. Perhaps it's due to fine motor control and babies are able to grasp and execute hand movements sooner than mouth/throat movements.

References

January 30, 2011
This week in Psycholingustics, we discussed the different theories associated with speech perception. One theory that we discussed was Motor Theory. Motor Theory was proposed by Liberman et al in 1967 and it was believed that you could understand speech based on how you articulate. This theory was later revised to: speech is perceived within the brain by a specific module that is designed to recognize the associated gestures that accompany phonetic information.

In class we discussed counter-evidence to the original motor theory. One example was that infants are able to comprehend speech before they are able to speak. Thus if speech can only be perceived by the process of knowing how words are articulated then infants should not be able to communicate with adults using sign language. Another example was that animals are also capable of understanding language because you are able to command them to perform (if taught) tricks. It's interesting that Liberman revised the concept of motor theory to include gestures, but it still seems as though it's a flawed theory. Blind and deaf individuals, like Helen Keller, are still able to communicate and understand speech but according to motor theory they shouldn't be able to because they are unable to see the accompanied gestures, or hear/replicate the correct sounds. Helen Keller may be a special example however as she did not become deaf and blind until she contracted a severe illness at 19 months.

However, the concept of motor theory made me curious about something else: feral children. Feral children are children who have been isolated from human contact at a relatively young age. Feral children are typically deprived of many things (love, care, etc) but specifically language. There are all sorts of legendary feral children, such as Romulus and Remus who are brought up by a female wolf until a shepherd finds the twins. They later go on to be the founders of Rome.

One infamous case of a feral child is Genie. Genie's case is a horrific one: she spent the first thirteen years of her childhood locked inside of a bedroom while strapped to a potty. Her father deprived of her of language by barking at her instead of speaking, and would punish her if she ever vocalized. This is clearly a case of terrible abuse, and once Genie was discovered researchers took an interest in studying her and her abilities. Genie had surpassed the critical period of language acquisition, and she became a research interest in regards to supporting the language acquisition theory. Genie was able to develop the skills to verbally communicate (as well as through sign language) with others, but her capabilities were severely limited. Clearly we are still capable of language after we pass through the critical acquisition period, but our abilities are still limited. I think that Genie's story brings up a lot of intriguing questions in regards to speech. For example, it appears that Genie was capable of understanding other people who spoke to her but was limited in her ability to communicate herself. If the original theory of motor theory is correct, she shouldn't have been able to understand higher levels of speech because she didn't have the ability to either produce or communicate in that manner. Genie could be asked questions that to us are "normal" and not complex, but was only capable of answering in short disjointed answers. It seems like if motor theory is right, then while she is capable of producing the sounds needed to analyze speech than she should have been able to either replicate speech on a higher level, or have a different way of perceiving speech. Clearly there is much more to speech perception than just motor theory!

Genie's story is a very tragic one, and it's really difficult to read and learn about people who suffer from this kind of horrific abuse. It's devastating to learn that these kinds of things still can occur in society today, because we'd like to think that the world is a bit better than it was centuries ago. I hope that by writing about these sorts of topics, people become more aware of the abuse that still occurs in today's society. Genie was found forty years ago, which is really not that long ago. One thing that was really amazing is that after she was removed from her father, she did begin to express genuine affection to people who were present in her life (i.e. researchers). Another thing however in regards to Genie is that a lot of people involved in her case were more interested in becoming famous, rather than genuinely helping her. If you read the Wikipedia article about her life, she's been constantly moved into foster homes, and she's actually regressed a lot in her language abilities because in one of her foster homes she was severely abused again. To be honest, I had already known a bit about Genie, but reading the article just really affected me and I did cry. I hope that other people come away from this blog post with a little bit more awareness, as well as compassion for people who are in abusive situations.

References

February 5, 2011
This week in Psycholinguistics we learned about morphology. Through learning about morphemes (which are the smallest units of meaningful language/function) we discussed the different types of typology in languages. Morphological typology is the distinguishing features between different languages, such as isolating, agglutinative, synthetic, polysynthetic, and infixing. . In isolating language, every word is a single morpheme (1:1 ratio) and this is seen in Chinese and Vietnamese. In agglutinative languages, there are boundaries to separate morphemes from each other, and these boundaries are distinct. Synthetic languages have one morpheme with various meanings, and an example of synthetic language would be French. . English is typically thought to be mix of isolating, agglutinative, and fusional typology.

In learning about these different typologies for language, it made me think about how the different typologies of language may create different ways of thinking. For example, most people know that there are vast differences between East Asian and Western cultures. For example, it's more common in the East for parents to live with their children as they grow older, while in the West we tend to place our parents in nursing homes. There's also vast differences in concepts, like individuality is a largely Western concept while East Asian countries typically focus on a more communal way of living. Another example of West vs East is that Westerners tend to focus on categories, while East Asians typically focus on the relationships. Research has shown that Westerners tend to only pay attention to a focal object, while East Asians are attending to the overall picture.

I wonder though if these cultural differences may be due the differences in language typology, and processing. One interesting thing is that in Japanese, there are different styles of writing ("alphabets") based on the origin of the word. Words that were borrowed from Chinese, are written in kanji, words from other languages (i.e. English) are written in katakana, and words that originate from the Japanese are written in either kanji or hiragana. It seems that in the processing system of Japanese, there are four options such as: mental, material, verbal, and relational. IIt seems interesting that a culture that is associated with relational thinking has a processing system that involves relations as a "primary option".

Language influences a lot of aspects in our lives, from how we communicate to how we typically think. By having different typology of languages, it seems that there should be vast differences between typologies in not only how language is processed and understood, but also in the way that the cultures may differ. It seems likely that a core concept in language should influence the perception you have of the world.

References

February 13, 2011
This week in Psycholinguistics we discussed syntax. It was interesting to get the first taste of syntax through a lecture because I have been working on the Syntax in the Brain chapter for Psycholinguistics. The lecture however didn't focus on where syntax worked within the brain, but instead gave a general overview of syntax.

I think that syntax is interesting because we seem to know instinctively whether a phrase is grammatically correct. Sometimes we don't know why a sentence sounds wrong, we just know that it is. One valuable lesson from the lecture was that grammar does not equal meaning. This means that while a sentence can be grammatically correct it may not have any semantic value. A wonderful example of this would be Lewis Carroll and his Jabberwocky poem:
 * "And, as in uffish thought he stood,
 * The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
 * Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
 * And burbled as it came!"
 * - Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.

Lewis Carroll was really able to maximize syntactic rules while using senseless words that in the context of the sentence seem to actually have some meaning. For exampe, uffish isn't a word but in the context of the sentence you can deduce that it is an adjective being used to describe a kind of thought. Syntax is really neat because it's basically a set of rules that dictates the proper structure and format of a sentence, but it really doesn't provide a framework for having a meaningful sentence. Clearly you can have sentences that follow the proper formatting but are devoid of any real meaning. However when mistakes are made with regards to syntax, they are glaringly obvious. For example, my friend and I had some "bad grammar" moments this week. She was about to take a test and I told her, "Have a good luck!" which is clearly grammatically incorrect.

However, non-native speakers tend to make these types of mistakes because while syntax is innate, it is different in other languages. For example, Japanese is a "head-final" language which means that a sentence follows a complement-noun/verb format so that instead of saying, 'Chihiro ate yaki-udon' it would be, 'Chihiro yaki-udon ate'. This type of phrasing seems very bizarre to a native English speaker, I had to ask ǂ : is learning a second language that uses head-final sentence branching more difficult if you speak a language that is head-initial?

Literature seems to suggest that when adults are learning a second language, there is a slower progression when learning languages that are opposite to your syntactic rules. It seems that this occurs because learners may not have adequate control over using sentences that used a branching sentence. As a result, they tend to avoid sentences that use branching. For example, an English speaker (head-initial) will have a harder time learning Japanese (head-final) than if they attempted to learn Portuguese (head-initial). It seems like the reason why it is harder to learn a language that opposes your native languages head-phrasing is because learners have a harder time with accurately predicting the structural configurations of a sentence, as well as there is a difference in ability.

I found this to be really interesting because perhaps if people have a knowledge of the different syntactic rules for the language they are trying to learn, they may have an easier time learning a second language as an adult. It's very interesting that these types of problems are typically seen in adults learning language versus a young child learning a second language. While syntax for our own language is an innate ability, I wonder if the problem with learning the syntax of another language is due to never engaging in introspection of our own syntactic rules so other languages seem completely foreign.

ǂsorry for the blatant joke.

References

February 27, 2011
We've had a week off from school, and one thing that really stuck with me from Feb. 18th's lecture was an example from class:
 * "Donald and his third wife entered Mario’s. When they were seated, Donald declared himself unhappy with his table, which, located near the door, was not conducive to a romantic conversation. He requested a table in the back of the restaurant. He studied the menu and ordered ossobucco for two. The food was great. Instead of a dessert, they ordered cappuccino. Donald left a big tip." (Newman, 2011).

Dr. Newman asked us questions about the example, such as: what kind of restaurant did he dine at? Even though the restaurant is not discussed in the actual example, we are able to conclude based on hints that they most likely dined at an Italian restaurant because they ate ossobucco and had a cappuccino. As I was writing this I almost wrote that they had "tiramisu" for dinner, which is a classical Italian dessert, but this isn't mentioned in the example! Dr. Newman mentioned that it's likely that when we thought back to the example we would remember things from the example that weren't likely there if we were to later describe them such as: Donald is an older man (based on the fact he has a third wife), he complained to the waiter to get a different table (he actually "declared himself unhappy with his table" but it's not even mentioned who he complained to!), he had a romantic conversation with his third wife (the table wasn't conducive to a romantic conversation), and that they dined at an Italian restaurant (which is true but is never mentioned).

I thought that it was interesting how even though these specific details are not mentioned in the story, we are able to discern what is occurring in the story. This example and our later recollection of the story makes a mental model that portrays the "gist" of the story, so when telling someone we may say, "Donald and his third wife went to an Italian restaurant for dinner, where they had a romantic conversation and tiramisu for dessert.". The problem with mental models is that they may not accurately represent the discourse which can lead to misunderstandings, or inferences (as in the case of Donald).

One study that focused on inferences was conducted by Kintsch et al (1990) who tested sentence memory by presenting subjects with a sentence that could vary in terms of discourse (i.e. original, word order changed, and sentences that could be inferred by the subject) It was found that when subjects were immediately tested after being shown the original sentence, they were able to accurately determine (~0.7 probability) whether the sentence was identical to the original one or not. It was found that when subjects were immediately shown a paraphrased sentence after seeing the original one, they incorrectly guessed half the time (0.5 probability) that the sentence was the same as the original. When immediately shown an inference sentence though, subjects only said identified the sentence as being the original ~0.2 of the time. However a delay in recall increased the effect of incorrectly identifying the inference sentences as being the original, and after a four day delay the probability of subjects identifying the inference sentence as the original rose to ~0.6. The study showed that there was such a thing as sentence memory and that it was affected by levels of discourse within a sentence.

This made me think about memory, and how it can be really faulty. For instance, studies have shown that flashbulb memories is really a misnomer. When you think about what happened on a monumental day, for example 9/11, you feel as though you can "vividly recall" what happened but it's likely that this memory is wrong. Flashbulb memories are like regular memories and they fail in the same way as normal memories: previous knowledge, and inferences can affect your memories and contort them into something else. There have been studies where immediately after an important event, a subject will write down their memory of what happened but when asked the same question at a later time period, the memory has generally changed. Usually previous knowledge interferes with the memory when recalled at a later date so that the memories from the same subject don't line up. It's funny that flashbulb memories feel so distinct and that you "vividly remember" what happened, but studies have shown that these types of memories have the same faulty mechanisms of regular memories, but because they're so significant they feel more memorable than a regular memory.

It's funny to think that regular memories are distorted after time, but not only are regular or significant memories distorted after a delay in recall but a delay in sentence memory can lead to a twisting of the facts as well. When I think about how sentence memory becomes increasingly faulty over time, it makes me wonder whether when we brood over a conversation that went poorly if it's actually as bad as we thought it went. Or when we're trying to interpret a conversation after we had it, if it's actually being recollected correctly or if other knowledge is interfering with it (i.e. we think maybe someone is mad at us, but we find out they had a bad day and when we re-examine the conversation we may see cues that let us know that they were in fact having a bad day). I wonder if the previous memories of a conversation with someone also may affect how we interact with them in the future, for example maybe we met someone who said something sarcastically and we later interpreted it as being very rude so that when we see them again we may think, "Oh, great, it's that guy.".

It seems that while our brain is capable of providing all of these great cognitive features, it still has some work to do!

References

March 6, 2011
This week in class we began to discuss speech output. One topic I found interesting was speech errors. We talked about the different types of speech errors people can make. My favourite one was blended speech errors because they happen commonly enough and they're always kind of funny. I thought that it was kind of weird that a lexical bias (a type of error that involves substituting a real word that sounds phonologically similar to another, for example: darn-bore and barn-dore) is typically seen in English.

This made me wonder why a strong lexical bias is seen in English. Other researchers have shown that these speech errors tend to only show up in English. A research study on speech errors in Spanish demonstrated that lexical speech errors only occur about 35% of the time which was equivalent to chance. However in English a lexical speech error is seen approximately 40-45% of the time. When I first thought about this difference, I thought it was really strange because it seems like if lexical errors are supposed to be the most common than they should be seen in different languages, but there is a considerable bias for English instead. It made me wonder if maybe this due to some other factor like how English language is constructed versus other languages, and that maybe some innate characteristic of English lends itself to lexical biases. I don't know what would be different though, maybe it's the typology of English, or the different grammar/speech rules that make English speakers more susceptible to lexical errors.

Thinking about speech errors though was interesting because I realized that even when someone is engaging in internal dialogue speech errors still occur! This was really interesting to realize because it seems like if speech errors are a result of language output then we shouldn't have these types of errors occur when we're thinking to ourselves. Studies have shown that people internally analyze speech while engaging in a conversation to determine whether or not a word is used correctly, or whether the sentence is grammatically correct. Based on this other researchers have proposed that the reason why lexical biases are seen is because when engaged in internal speech or listening to someone talk, there is a system involved in analyzing sentences for "non-words". If this system is in place and is frequently looking for non-word speech errors than it's easy to see why a lexical errors may occur more frequently. However, the question still stands as to why do we still have speech errors occur when engaging in internal dialogue? Is it because thinking to yourself engages the same systems that would be involved in a conversation with an individual?

At first I thought that it seemed strange that you would be able to have speech errors when you're not even speaking. It seems like speech errors should occur when you're talking with someone else but after thinking about it more it makes sense. Evolutionarily speaking it wouldn't make sense for two separate systems to have arisen that each basically do the same job. One system is less complex than having two, and thus it makes sense that speech errors would still occur if we're using the same system to speak while we think to ourselves. The benefit of having an integrated system is we're able to self-monitor and pick up on our own speech errors while we think, but also to pick up on them before we actually speak. If the there were two systems involved it would be very difficult to self-monitor for any errors before speaking, and it's likely that speech output would take longer. I thought it was really interesting that errors in inner speech can illicit different effects like: interrupting our own flow of speech to think about the error, or quickly fixing the error so that speech can continue as normal, another speech error may occur, or that we may just completely miss out on the error. Based on this self monitoring system it seems more likely that we're going to stop ourselves from using non-words (easier to notice in our speech errors because they aren't words) but words that are phonologically similar may be able to slip through the system and pepper our speech. I like the idea of having a system in place to be on the lookout for these non-words that may slip into our speech, but can appreciate that it's not on the look out for words that don't fit in the context of the situation and that's likely why we have these types of lexical speech errors. When you think about it though, language is really complex without even considering input and output of language. English alone is confusing enough as it tends to have many words with multiple meanings (i.e. present: moment in a time, a gift) so if you don't quite have a grasp of the language it's easy enough to make mistakes without even considering the amount of mistakes that can occur in input and output for language!

I guess I'd like to conclude this blog post with one of my favourite speech errors: Blue Blazer Black

References

March 10, 2011
On Monday we discussed a well known phenomenon: tip of the tongue. Tip of the tongue (TOT) is weird because it's something that everyone experiences from time to time. It typically entails trying to say a word but you're suddenly unable to remember the word even if it is relatively common. An example would be my own recent blunder: "Can you hand me that object that is long, brown, thin and you put papers into?" For the life of me I couldn't remember the word for envelope, so this was my way of coping with it. Usually I just say "thing" and hope that someone knows what I mean!

One thing that's kind of cool about TOT is even though we experience the sensation of being on the verge of getting the word, we're still able to access other information in regards to the word. Research studies have demonstrated that when people experience the TOT phenomenon they're still able to access information about the word: such as syntax, and semantics. These types of studies demonstrated that people are able to access this kind of information before phonological information, but people are often able to say what the first syllable of the word may be or how many syllables are in the word.

The TOT phenomenon made me think about which kinds of words actually cause the phenomenon. Personally I feel that the words I most frequently forget are words that are common, every-day words. I think that it makes sense that the TOT experience would occur more frequently with common words because I feel like there may be competing synaptic nodes that may be associated with the word and thus activate the wrong words. However studies have shown that uncommon words frequently illict the TOT experience. This is likely due to the fact that the synaptic connections for uncommon words are weaker than more frequently used words. Luckily for my line of thinking other researchers have demonstrated that words that are frequently used can also invoke TOT.

Based on what I could find, it seems like researchers are at odds with one another over what is the genuine cause behind TOT (which begs the question of why can scientists never agree with one another!). Based on what research articles I have read it seems like it is likely some combination of both of these theories: that common words do have stronger synaptic connections (which can be in competition with other words), but also uncommon words also experience TOT because they are less frequently use and the synaptic connections are weaker (therefore easier to forget). Research has begun to focus on age and the relation to TOT and they have found that TOT experiences increase as you age. This is likely due to your mental processes slowing down.

TOT was interesting to research a bit more because it is a common speech problem that happens to many individuals. One thing I find interesting about TOT experiences personally is that I may even have the right word in my mind but it doesn't "feel correct" until someone confirms. For example, last night I was writing about action potential conductance and I struggled for the word conductance. Upon reflection I realized that I was able to get the "kah" sound out, explain what it meant, and I did keep coming back to conductance but it never felt like the appropriate word until someone else did confirm that was the word. I wonder how much TOT experience really is forgetting a word versus some type of mental block that may stop you from accessing that yes, this word is the correct one you're looking for!

References

March 20, 2011
This week we talked about development of language within children. Funnily enough, a lot of things that I've already discussed here were mentioned (i.e. baby sign, Genie). We also talked about motherese which was interesting to me. I'm sure everyone has experienced it: they see a cute baby, or an animal (that may or may not be tiny) and find that their voices change. They tend to have a higher pitched voice that stresses and prolongs vowels. It's funny to think about but it does happen, and it's very intuitive. Learning about motherese made me wonder why it happened. Was it because speaking at a higher pitch allowed infants to hear better? But if that was the case then motherese should always be high-pitched. However when a baby cries the mother tends to speak in a lower soothing voice which still stresses and prolongs vowels. If it's not a case of motherese being used so that the baby can hear then maybe it has more to do with attention? Fernald suggested that the prosody mothers use may be finely adapted to the attention and arousal level of the infant. Thus if a baby requires soothing the mother speaks in a lower voice but if the baby is excited then a higher pitch is used.

It seems really fascinating to me that this ability is so innate because it really doesn't require any thinking or planning on the mother's part. It just happens. This made me wonder about maybe why motherese is so intuitive. It seems likely to me that if a new mother with little experience of babies (unlikely in this day and age but still) may try soothing her baby and find that a higher pitched voice doesn't sooth. Instead it may make the baby more excited (i.e. irritated/upset) and this only furthers the mother from her goal of soothing the baby. She may then try a quieter voice to sooth her baby and usually a quieter voice means a lower pitch. If the lower pitch does work to sooth the baby then it's likely that the mother will continue to use a soothing lower pitched voice. In a way conditioning occurs so that the mother continues to use a soothing voice to calm her baby down. This can also work in the opposite way: a mother is more likely to respond to an excited baby (happy baby) in a higher pitched voice. For times when the baby is in a good mood and giggling, they respond more to higher pitched voices. The more a high pitched voice is used, the more engaged the baby becomes (i.e. giggling, smiling, gurgling, basically responding) so the mother will continue to use the high pitched voice in those moments.

Studies have shown that when babies listen to either a normal adult conversation or motherese, they prefer motherese. The baby is also more responsive to the voice of the mother. This is probably because the baby can listen to sounds within the uterus, and will hear the mother's voice the most and thus respond more to her voice. Infants also get a lot out of motherese though as it helps them develop their language abilities since the words are clearly stressed and occur at a slower tempo. This is supported by the fact that the language abilities of an infant are associated with the clarity of the mother's speech!

I wondered what the effects of motherese would be on children who had a language disability such as autism. Some children with autism tend to be unresponsive to speech. Around 25% have language disorders. It seems that infants with autism tend to prefer superimposed voices versus their own mother's voice in experimental studies. ERP measurements have also demonstrated that children with autism tend to not to pay attention to speech. This was really interesting to me because perhaps this may be a reason why children with autism sometimes have language disorders. If a child prefers to listen to the speech of others than the motherese which is designed to help facilitate language development in infants, then they may not be able to pick up on prosody or word borders. Without being able to learn the sounds and patterns of the native language, these infants may struggle later with language.

Thus it seems like motherese must be very influential in teaching infants their native language. By using exaggerated speech and slowing down the tempo of speech, infants develop language skills that they will use for the rest of their life.

References

March 21, 2011
This week in class we talked about bilingualism. I find bilingualism very interesting, because I have many friends who speak other languages. Growing up, my best friend was Polish. She knew Polish, English, and French (so really trilingual!). Being with her was interesting because I would pick up on Polish words. I remember one time her mother asked me a question in Polish and I knew what she had asked, but that was my only "fluent" moment. I distinctly remember asking her father once for a peach when we were at the beach, and he gave me a drink. There were lots of little "errors in translation" between me and her parents but never any issues between her and I.

One thing I always found kind of funny though is when people who are bilingual switch between languages. For instance there are times where I listen to my friend talk to their mom on the phone, and they switch from their native language to English and it seems like they don't realize that it happened. It's kind of neat how they can switch, and seemingly not realize. It made me wonder why as a native English speaker I can pick up on the English words in their conversations though.

It seems like we can pick up on our language when listening to other people speak because we probably know where the word boundaries are. One of my Egyptian friends thought it was funny that English speakers can pick up on these English words even when other Arabic words are used that we have no clue about. She mentioned that she's always wondered if other people noticed, but never asked.

I know that when you listen to a foreign language that you've heard very minimally you don't know where the pauses between words occurs. It sounds like just one long big word. However the more you familiarize yourself with the language, you can begin to hear the breaks between words. You know what sounds go with what sounds, and if they don't match then you know that there's a "pause" in the conversation. You become familiarized to the speech boundaries. It makes sense that when you listen to someone speak a foreign language you don't know where the pauses are, but when they throw in English words you're able to decipher and understand those words because you know the speech boundaries. You know that the sounds "oh" and "kay" go together to make the word "ok". We categorize words into their phonemes when we listen to language. Discrimination of speech boundaries through phonemes is very useful because we are able to have cues as to what other phonemes may follow. This is because we know what sounds go together and what sounds don't go together for our native language.

Thinking about speech boundaries though reminds me of my Systems Neuroscience class from second year. We learnt that when you analyze the sound waves of speech, there's actually no "pauses". We just hear pauses because we know where the words end and begin (i.e. speech boundaries). So if you're listening to someone speaking a foreign language it's hard to know where words begin and end, but if you continue to expose yourself to the language or familiarize yourself with the language you'll begin to learn the intrinsic rules for phonemes about that language similar to the intrinsic phoneme rules for your native language.

The interesting thing about learning new languages is that you sometimes need to unlearn your native's languages rules. This is because these boundaries may or may not occur within a new language, so your brain needs to stop inhibiting the processing of those phonemes so that you can begin to master the new language. This seems kind of cool because it explains why you may not be able to hear the differences between words when learning a new language. In class a while back we discussed Hindi and how non-native speakers cannot hear the difference between: ḍal (lentil) and dal (branch).

One last thing about bilingualism which I find kind of funny: one of my friends is from Croatia, and speaks Serbian. However she's lived in Canada for a very long time and so now whenever she speaks Serbian she actually has an English accent! Upon reflection of why this may be, it is likely that due to "intensive" use of speaking English she may have developed an English accent in Serbian. She would only speak Serbian at home with her family, and from what I have learnt about language this semester it seems like that wouldn't be sufficient in order to not have an accent. If you're enrolled in an English school for 6 hrs a day, 5 days a week for 15 years plus interacting with people outside of the home and interacting with your friends, your use of another language may be less and so you could develop an accent in your own native tongue!

References

April 2, 2011
This week in class we started debates. The debates were pretty interesting, and some were pretty charged. The first debate was kind of a debacle in my opinion. The topic itself was on Ebonics and whether it should be taught in a classroom. I felt that the AGAINST side was overly aggressive and not very respectful towards to the FOR side. I was also horrified by some of the things the students on the AGAINST side said as they made up facts, and just said really racially charged things that were inappropriate in any setting. The information though from the debate was pretty interesting and made me think.

The FOR side argued that in Oakland, California, Ebonics should be taught as a primary language within the schools. It was interesting to hear because (as I'm sure most people have posted about) was unaware that Ebonics was actually it's own separate language. It seems really sad to me that these facts aren't known and celebrated by others. I think it's clear that Ebonics should be celebrated as a language with it's own culture. In Canada we celebrate the fact that we're multicultural and that we are a bilingual country. It seems sad that the USA doesn't seem to feel the same way, or at least it appears that way from an outsider's perspective.

It's hard to know how I feel about this particular debate. I felt like the FOR side made some very strong points about celebrating Ebonics within a community where 53% spoke Ebonics. However, even in Canada we don't teach Arabic in our schools where perhaps there is a larger Arabic community than other communities. It gets to be a very sticky situation because if we don't celebrate other culture's languages in our schools, are we catering to the white majority? Or is it "safe to assume" that if people are immigrating to "our" country (when in reality Caucasians immigrated here) that they want to learn English? Should we offer schools where you can interact in a different language or is that separatism? The whole situation is just confusing, and it's uncomfortable to discuss aloud.

Another point the FOR side made for this debate was that by teaching Ebonics in a classroom you're opening students to bilingualism as English would be later taught. There are many benefits of bilingualism but I think that the point of teaching English as a secondary language later in the curriculum was a poor choice. It would be more beneficial to teach BOTH languages within the school so that students are bilingual from an early age. English unfortunately in North America is the language of the "majority" (though it could be argued that the language of the majority in the USA is Spanish). Bilingualism also doesn't seem to be as highly valued in the USA as it is in Canada, and there's definitely a "supremacy" belief (in my opinion) about English. There are very little opportunities for bilingual speakers in the USA. There seems to be a lot of misconception about bilingualism. Many people believe that by teaching your children to be bilingual that your child will have many language delays. Parents also tend to believe that that by teaching children to be bilingual they will "confuse" their children but this is another common misconception about bilingualism.

In my opinion it seems like it's definitely beneficial to teach students two languages so that they become bilingual earlier in life. Bilingualism will enhance opportunities in life (especially if you speak English and French in Canada) but also foster self-pride. But the question still remains: should another language be taught in a country that is not bilingual?

In the case of Ebonics, it seems fair for English to be taught as the primary language. Children will be able to speak in their primary language at home, but learning English in a school setting would be more beneficial because English is the language of the country they live in. By learning to speak English they are enhancing the amount of opportunities they can have later in life (i.e. university, jobs). I know many people who speak one language at home, and speak English in school settings and they have done well. By isolating a community and sheltering it in it's own culture you may be stopping individuals from reaching further out of the community and into the country.

However, while English should be taught in the classrooms I think that it is important for teachers to be trained and understand that the community they are teaching in is a community that celebrates it's own language and culture outside of English. Teachers need to understand that Ebonics is a language, and not improper English which is what most people believe it is unfortunately, and need to recognize that while a paper may not be written entirely in English, there are going to be some formatting errors like that when teaching a language that isn't central in a community especially in younger children.

It seems unfortunate that countries don't celebrate the extensive amount of cultures that exist in their country. At the same time however it seems fair that if you're immigrating to a new country, you should learn the language of the country so that you can be an active participant within the country and even within your own community. It seems a bit unfair to immigrate to a new country for all the new opportunities and freedoms, but not want to learn the language and culture of the country you're immigrating to. On a personal level I would never go to Japan without trying to learn the language, especially if I planned on living in the country. By not engaging in the customs of the country you're adopting as your second home, you're severely isolating yourself from new and rich cultural experiences. I've met individuals who have travelled to foreign countries and when in groups there is a tendency to not want to learn the language because you already know people who speak the same language as you, but at the same time I feel as though if you do that then you're really not taking the cultural experience in.

It's difficult to learn a new language, but it's even more difficult to live in a foreign country isolating yourself from other people.

References

April 6th, 2011
Well, this is the last blog post of the year. How exciting!

I enjoyed the Psycholinguistics class a lot. It was really interesting and I felt like I learned a lot. I admit I stopped taking notes half way through the semester, but I enjoyed the freedom of blog writing and how I could take a topic we discussed in class and expand my own knowledge from it. I learnt a lot of cool things that I wouldn't have otherwise known, like how syntax is visualized within the brain. I really enjoyed the guest lecture we had for the InteRACT program and I wish that the lecture could have been a bit longer because the lecturer seemed like she had a lot to say.

I think my favourite parts of class would be learning about bilingualism, as well as the different typologies of languages. Those classes really stand out in my mind as interesting classes. Learning about the different types of aphasia more in depth was great too. Every first year Psychology class briefly touches on aphasia but it was really interesting to learn the different types in more depth, and see videos about them.

For the most part I enjoyed writing the blogs. It gave me a chance to explore things in more depth, and to think critically. To be honest though it eventually got difficult to think of new interesting blog posts to write about. I tried to read other people's blogs, and I spent a lot of time reading my friends. I felt sad that a lot of students seemed to be just summarizing what happened in class because there's so many interesting avenues that they could have explored with their blog posts! I tried very hard to be creative and ask good questions with my blog posts. The blog posts were a good way to be creative with subject matter, and to also research personal interests.

I enjoyed working on the chapter. I felt like it was a fun project, and I really support the idea of giving everyone equal opportunity to education. I find sometimes we're a bit elitist about the opportunities we have for education, especially post-secondary education. Not everyone has the same opportunities that we do and that shouldn't mean that they shouldn't have access to an education. I think the idea of freeing our university classes is great because it still has the same content as a regular lecture class, but without the commitment which can be nice as well. The one criticism I have about the chapter is I felt like I really did learn a lot about Syntax in the Brain, but I didn't learn much from the other chapters. To be honest I read my friends chapters, and the one I had to peer review. I feel like this probably happened to a lot of people where they really focused on their own chapters and no one else's. The one criticism I have about the Chapter/Learning exercise would be it would have been nice to have access to the grading rubric, so that we would know what kind of things we were being graded on.

I enjoyed the debates for the most part. I thought that the topics that were assigned were really interesting, and I really enjoyed working with my group. I had a great group, and we had a lot of fun together. I know this probably wasn't the case for most people though, but luckily I was in a group where I knew two thirds of my group (excluding me of course!). The twenty second time limit for slides was really intimidating at first, but I found that as we continued practicing (a lot) we were able to not only cut words, but also be under 20 seconds without losing too much information. I thought that the subject matter was really interesting, and I think everyone did a great job of arguing their points even if they didn't agree with their stance.

Overall I really did enjoy this class. I'm glad I took it, and I feel like it was a lot of fun. I learnt a lot of really interesting aspects about language which was my goal for the course so yay. I'll kind of miss wikiversity!

Thanks to Aaron and Sarah for making this course what it was! :)

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