User:Aslwin

I am a fourth year psychology major at Dalhousie University and I am from Moncton, New Brunswick. I have extensive experience working with special needs children (mainly autism) and hope to get into the Speech Language Pathology program at Dalhousie so that I can further help children as it pertains to speech disorders.

Blog Post 1: January 17th, 2011
The first couple weeks of this course have taught me exactly how little I know about the area of language, its formation and its perception. Having always swayed away from the neuroscience aspect of psychology for the majority of my degree, it will be interesting to see how I deal with “all this brain stuff”! Instead of focusing on this week’s covered material as food for thought, I’m going to take another route. Having been confined to my bed all weekend thanks to the flu, I took this opportunity to view some youtube videos on Aphasia- the topic I will be covering. I know very little about the subject, but am highly interested in it and being a visual learner, youtube works wonders for concreting concepts into my brain. These videos clearly showed the difference between Wernicke’s Aphasia and Broca’s Aphasia, and the difficulties associated with both. What I found so intriguing about these patients was how “in good spirits’ they seemed to be. Despite all of the frustrations that are associated with loss of effective communication with the world, they seemed relatively at ease. If you are interested, check them out! Some personal favourites of mine: “Tono Tono”, and “Broca’s Aphasia Sarah Scott”. The first is of an older man who responds to questions with “Tono”, and the second is of a teenage girl who suffered a stroke and now has Broca’s Aphasia. Sarah’s videos are quite interesting in that it shows an initial video, and then a follow up video in which she has made quite a bit of progress after therapy. I hope you enjoy!

Blog Post 2: January 24th, 2011
This week we delved into the brain and all of the areas involved in language. I found it fascinating that we are able to localize functions to different areas in the brain, save for some interconnecting functions. In my time working with special needs children, I encountered many with speech problems or the inability to speak at all. In these situations I was responsible for behaviour modification or I simply acted as a means of respite for the parent. I always understood what I was responsible for doing with the clients but I never looked too much into the methods that I was using. Learning more about the brain has made me re-evaluate these experiences. For example, one of my main cases was working with a nine year old severely autistic girl who was completely non-verbal, and had a vocabulary of about five signing words (her favourite being ‘more’ in reference to candies!). I regularly used the PECS book with her as an alternate form of communication. A PECS book is a fairly durable book with pictures of everyday items or emotions stuck into place with Velcro, with the point being that the non-verbal client can flip it open if she wanted to go for a drive, and pick out the picture of the car to indicate so. I understood that this was her way of communication but I, for some reason, never explored the idea of what may be going on in her brain. Looking retrospectively at this experience has helped me solidify the idea of language in its different forms being of use to people. Although unable to produce speech, she was able to understand basic commands and questions about what she wanted (to which she would respond through use of the PECS book) which would suggest that she had at least a partially functioning auditory-sensory pathway. So then her impairment must have been in a non-functioning motor pathway… or is this model of language production inappropriate for studying language impairments in Autistic individuals?

Blog Post 3: January 31st, 2011
Having left last week’s topics covering things such as prosody, intonation, and stress syllables, I am glad to be able to study in public again free of someone laughing at my sounding out words from every example given. Don’t laugh, you’ve all done it.

This week I’m going to focus on the subject of reading. Reading, for University students, is a necessity. It is something that becomes second nature, and as such it can easily be forgotten how complex the process of reading can be, and how it poses problems for so many around the world. For example, at a very basic level, illiteracy or inability to read affects people’s ability to drive. “Stop”, street names, “Yield” signs: An inability to read these makes driving extremely difficult (especially when considering street names as there are no visual cues, i.e. a big red octagon, to fall back on for recognition).

With this in mind, I entered into reading the chapter on how we read while actively trying to understand the gravity of these impairments when faced with processing deficits. Considering the section on acquired dyslexia specifically I earned that deep dyslexics can identify concrete words better than abstract ones, and surface dyslexics are able to decode pseudowords, but have great difficulty with irregular or unusual pronunciation. I had no idea that there was more than one type of dyslexia which goes to prove how much this class is opening up my eyes to language disorders which I once thought were cut and dry. I wonder what types of therapies are available to these different types of dyslexics and how much it improves their ability to do everyday things, such as driving. I look forward to learning about it in the future!

Blog Post 4: February 7th, 2011
The structure of the internal lexicon: How do we store words in our memory? Do we have a mental filing system in which we categorize events and cross reference….what happens when these filing systems begin to overflow? These were the questions I have always asked of memory in general, but never thought of in relation to language and word memory. This chapter presented five different models of understanding the internal lexicon: The hierarchical network model, the spreading activation model, the semantic feature model, the ACT model of complex cognition, and WORDNET: an electronic lexical database. It was really interesting to see the progression of the models, from a fairly rudimentary hierarchical network model to a very comprehensive ACT model. Although it is out dated and replaced by newer and better models, the hierarchical model struck me as very interesting. It reminded me of the word clouds that teachers used to suggest we write before delving into writing a paper (At least I think they were called word clouds). The concept of it seems similar: using a root word or concept and finding similar topics or related concepts stemming from the initial topic. I guess this “annoying” task actually had a bit of psychological relevance to it! The one thing I am still left wondering about after this chapter is if we have a limit as to how to much we can store…

Blog Post 5: February 14th, 2011
The topic I will be exploring today is on gestures and lexical access. In the chapter description, it explains that gesturing while speaking may serve a dual purpose. It not only communicates information to the listeners, but aids in word retrieval for the speaker. Gestures are explained by Krauss as being “spatiodynamic features of concepts, which can facilitate lexical retrieval…”. The first thought I had on this was whether language differences played a part in the frequency of gesturing while speaking.I have noticed that some people use gesturing while speaking more frequently than others. I, for instance, have always been told that I use it quite a bit. My Acadian, French speaking family frequently uses their hands when talking, yet my fiance’s purely English family rarely uses it at all. What’s more, my Italian best friend’s family use their hands for speaking even more frequently than my French family. Does this then suggest that there may be language differences when it comes to the frequency of gesture usage? Interestingly though, and in directly going against what I stated previously, I am of Acadian descent, but I am an English speaker- So why do I use my hands so much? I am not French speaking, so perhaps I mimic my family in their gesturing? I wonder if there are any studies done on social factors and their influence on the frequency of gesturing while speaking, and what this may suggest about why I need gesturing more than others to lexically access words...

Blog Post 6: February 28th, 2011
Instead of focusing on the textbook readings for the week I’m going to touch upon a thought that occurred to me while working. Over the break I had the opportunity to work full time at my part-time job. I’m a daycare teacher to children aged 18 months-5 Years old. It is common knowledge that children develop at different rates than one another, which can also be said for the acquisition of speech. We have a two year old who speaks better than a four year old. We have a five year old leaving for school who probably should have seen a speech therapist by now, but hasn’t. Finally, the most intriguing child is a three-and-a-half year old whose ears were blocked for the first two years of his life. Essentially, this child was deaf, and having his ears cleared, he no longer is anymore. He obviously has limited speech abilities, and hasn’t shown much progress since starting at the daycare six months ago despite having regular sessions with a speech therapist. What I have been wondering is: at what point would the family choose to do something else about the situation? I remember in class, Newman brought up that so long as ASL was learned early on, the fundamental learning of components of language and language production would be understood. So would it not make sense to also teach the child Sign Language just in case normal speech does not develop, simply so the child would not miss out on this important stage of development? Perhaps there is more credence than I thought to the new fad of teaching your babies sign language after all.

Blog Post 7
Within the lecture on language development, I was intruiged about the lightly touched upon subject of feral children. As unfortunate as these case studies are, they provide a wealth of knowledge in terms of the study of language development. The cases of feral children obviously show grave impairments in crucial language acquisition, however, I was still left with questions after our brief touch on the subject. It is apparent that syntax was impaired in the case of Genie, which is also the case for many other feral children, but are these children equally impaired in other areas of communication that may not be verbal in nature? In some of these horrendous cases, children have been found after years of being raised by animals- wolves is one example. Since a social system with a mode of communication is in place within these groups, would the child then be not as impaired in body language as a means of communication? Since language between human beings does not consist of solely verbal output or signing in individuals who are deaf, it would be interesting to see these cases of feral children as compared to cases in which the child is void of communication as well as social interaction as a means of communication, to determine if any advantage is seen in one situation over the other when it comes to success of communication with other individuals.

Blog Post 8
I come from New Brunswick, the only official bilingual province within Canada. Naturally, this means my heritage is strongly rooted in both French and English speaking relatives. When I tell people that my family is mainly French, they often ask me if I am bilingual, and are surprised when I answer no. However, after this lecture I'm beginning to second guess myself- Perhaps I am bilingual? Not a true bilingual as researchers would term it, but at least partially. I am functional in simple conversational French, but because I cannot carry on an entire conversation, I have never termed myself as bilingual. What is more interesting, is that I can understand spoken French quite well. This is probably the result of being surrounded by French speakers; but having never been prompted to speak French myself, the need never arose for me to learn it in spoken form (and more importantly, the proper syntax of sentences...which is a large issue I have with speaking French). Having believed the notion that a new language is harder or impossible to acquire later in life, I had given up on the possibility of being completely fluent in French. The thought that I am left with after this lecture, is whether the amount of exposure I have had prior to my 'window of opportunity' being closed, is sufficient to allow for fluecy in the language even at my age.

Blog Post 9
I thought I would again touch on the subject of bilingualism, however with a focus on languages themselves and their transformations over time. It occured to me this past weekend, after spending time with my grandmother, that her French isn't quite as French as I had once thought. In response to a phonecall in which the other person spoke too loudly in her ear, she responded with "Tu ma bustay mon eardrum!". I wouldn't have paid attention to her response prior to this course- That is the way many of the French people speak in Southern New Brunswick; We call it Chiac. However, after she said it, I wondered to myself how the language had transformed to this stage. My grandmother is from Quebec, and came to New Brunswick speaking French exclusively. How is it that she came to amalgamate English into her purely French language? Furthurmore it would be interesting to study whether the meshing of the two languages is the way in which new dialects are formed and if it can be attributed to laziness or not.

Final Blog Post
Psycholinguistics has exposed me to the complexity of language. To speak, understand and effectively communicate had always seemed like second nature; however, to those who struggle with communication, I can now understand how language may seem like a very daunting task. In breaking down the components of language and the processes involved in communication, the disorders discussed later in the course were better understood. The blog posts as well as the wikiversity chapter were definitely an effective tool for teaching the subject content in that it required a constant interest in the subject. The blog posts also challenged us to think outside of the box, and to apply the things we learned as each section came to a close. Overall, I believe the presentation of the course was very enjoyable and highly effective in teaching the content to students in a non traditional way, thus ensuring an ongoing interest in the material throughout the semester.