User:Cbrousseau

Claire Brousseau

Claire Brousseau, a born-and-raised Haligonian, is a fourth-year undergraduate student, completing a double major in psychology and biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Upon graduation, Claire will be applying for the health sciences program at Dalhousie, with the hopes of studying respiratory therapy, and eventually completing the anaesthesia assistant program. Claire's favorite areas of study in psychology include language and development in children, and she hopes to further her knowledge and enthusiasm for these topics in Psycholinguistics 3190 this term. Claire is very excited about the idea of Wikiversity, and is looking forward to contributing to such a great knowledge base. She hopes this project will help other psychology students in the future.

Claire is looking forward to combining her studies with one of her favorite things: MUSIC! She is eager to begin learning more about the connections and interactions between language and music, and is excited about her term in Psycholinguistics with Dr. Newman. The process will be documented through weekly blogs as the project develops. Read on below to see the latest!

Visit the class' main page to see how everyone's progressing:
 * Psycholinguistics - Winter, 2011

January 10 - 14
Unlike many of the students in this class, I have never taken a course strictly devoted to language before, and frankly, I LOVE it! The courses I have taken that got me interested in linguistics were mostly centered around language acquisition and changes through the various stages of development. Now that I am being exposed to all of the history that led to the theories I had been taught, I am finally able to put my previous knowledge into context and perspective.

It was amazing to learn about so many different types of languages, cultures, and even species (as we saw with Kanzi), and how they communicate. For example, I had never realized that even sign language is different depending on where you live. I think, like many people, I had fallen into the fallacy of believing that it was essentially a "universal" language. I also found it so fascinating when Dr. Newman told us that we can't "see" a colour (for example, a shade between green and blue) if we don't have a word for it. I remember being completely boggled by this idea. How can we not SEE a colour that exists?? I think this was meant to reinforce the idea that a person would not see the colour "burnt sienna" if they didn't have that word to describe it...they might instead see it as a light brown or dark orange colour. No one can categorize something if their vocabulary doesn't have a category name for it.

My lingering questions from this weeks lectures were related to some of the more "simplistic" languages that we learned about (although I also learned this week that NO language is simple!!). The Toki Pona language, with so few words (symbols) and sounds is meant to create more using less. It also aims to create a happier atmosphere, where negative thoughts are almost impossible to express. To me, the whole idea of creating such a language sounds like it could be a psychology course within itself, but I was wondering whether the creators have achieved what they wished to accomplish? Are people who communicate through Toki Pona happier people, and is this actually related to use of the language itself, or simply because these people are open to such a way of life? It's an interesting concept, I just wonder whether people who are used to such a rich language would be able to simplify their vocabulary so drastically. Secondly, I was fascinated by the idea that we have so many different words that describe the exact same thing (where other languages would just use one word). How did it happen that some languages grew and branched off so much more extensively, while others stayed very basic, using only the words needed to convey their meaning. Our language has become so flowery, and new words are always being created as society (and even pop culture) changes, though I suppose some words are being "lost" for the same reason. Why did we feel the need to create 10 different words to describe snow, when one works perfectly well for other languages?

Needless to say I am on the edge of my seat, and am thoroughly enjoying the class. I am excited to start looking into more in-depth information about my chapter topic as well: combining language and music!

January 17 - 21
Needless to say, I am NOT a neuroscientist. I find the "brain stuff" a bit like trying to find your way around New York City for the first time: there's so much going on so quickly, it's very easy to get lost. I am, however, very interested in how we can use lesions or injuries to very specific areas of the brain in order to see what function these areas serve. This is fascinating considering that you can't exactly go around lesion-ing peoples' brains, it is simply an area that we study as the opportunities present themselves. This adds to the impressiveness of the amount of research that HAS been done and how much we know!

I have always been interested in the research on Broca's and Wernicke's area(s). Although it is not as simple as "speech perception vs. speech production" it is still a very good relationship that non-neuroscientists can enjoy! I know that double dissociations have been used to show how the two affect different areas and processes in the brain, but I am wondering whether anyone has ever found a way to "repair" these areas at all? I know brain damage is very dangerous and usually life-altering or lethal, but it would be interesting to see someone who had damaged one of these two areas, and showed some degree of healing. I think this would be so great to see if they were permanently disabled in functions of language, or whether some of these abilities would recover WITH the damaged areas. Maybe my lack of knowledge about the brain is showing here, but that would be so amazing to see someone try to completely learn to talk, or understand language again, as if they were an infant. Knowing that learning a second language as an adult is much more difficult, they may have a much harder time grasping the language than an infant would as well.

Perhaps it is possible, or purely my imagination but it would make a great movie! Until next week...

January 24 - 28
I am always fascinated by speech perception in general. Even as early as my intro psych class, professors have taught us that languages are much easier to learn as a young child, before neural connections have been completed, strengthened and pruned. I think it is incredible that children are able to learn two or even more languages at a time in development when we ask a lot (in terms of learning and growth) of these children.

While researching for another class, I learned a lot about imitation in children. We performed a study that included requiring the children to imitate certain words (both real and nonsense) after being asked to do so by both a live and a televised model. Though (as we were expecting), children performed better when imitating a live model, I was amazed at how many children were able to imitate both, let alone imitate at all in some cases. These children were as young as 12 months, up to age 3.5 years. This requires children to receive the language we are sending them (asking them to imitate), processing this language, and responding accordingly (being able to produce these same speech sounds themselves). The fact that children can do this in one, two, or even more languages is incredible. The interesting thing to note was where letters may be switched during repetition. For example "go" was sometimes replaced by "doh" when repeated back, or "wiggle" with "wipple" or "wickle".

It is also interesting how children are able to generalize when learning to speak. They know that adding "-ed" to a word usually makes it past tense, so we often hear them say "I goed to the store" instead of "went". I don't know a lot about sign language (although it is something I have always wanted to learn), but I wonder if the language rules for generalizing are the same? My understanding is that many times a single sign represents a whole word (instead of having to spell each word in a sentence). Would changing the word for play to played be the same thing required to change the word stay to stayed? If so, do these children ever experience the same problems with tense as we see in spoken language? I know that the processing would not be affected too drastically as that occurs in the brain, but the actual production step of the language processing...would that be affected in the same way?

January 31 - February 4
This was a short week, so our only lecture focused on morphology. As an elective I am taking an introductory anthropology course as well, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that this week's material focused on "language". I was really interested to compare the social/anthropological perspectives on language to those of a psychologist/linguist. We talked about many of the same topics covered in some of our introductory classes (in less detail of course), and I was even able to share what we'd learned about Toki Pona with the professor. Though some of the views and ideas were very similar in both classes, I did notice some interesting differences in the way that each approached or viewed some of the fieldwork. For example, linguists are often trying to create concrete structural "rules" (in a sense) that they can apply across various situations (or at least that is my initial observation, and from our morphology lecture). This allows us to learn about a new idea once and generalize our previous knowledge when we see a similar situation the next time instead of having to re-learn the same thing (similar to the idea of mental schemas). Anthropologists, on the other hand, do NOT seem to like to impose any sorts of rules at all...they are solely interested in observing the patterns or changes that take place naturally, and studying about why or how this occurred. They like to use differences in languages across cultures to make observations about how these differences may affect how different people view the world. My question that arose this week relates to this very idea of comparing the study of languages in two different disciplines. Our anthropology professor proposed the idea that "modern linguistics aims to be DESCRIPTIVE, not PRESCRIPTIVE" (Radice, 2011). In my opinion, this is very much the way that anthropologists approach language studies. They like to stand back and watch the changes that society experiences in languages, and observe what cultural changes may have caused these. Linguists seem to be a little more "prescriptive" though. I'm not entirely sure that the statement holds entirely true for psycholinguistics. In looking at morphology, there certainly ARE rules that we are expected to follow! In that sense linguistics DOES seem a bit prescriptive, as well as descriptive. It is like a description of the prescription of language. I was just thinking about what the two sides would say, or how they would feel about such a statement?

February 7 - 11
The majority of my energy in psycholinguistics this week was directed towards researching my textbook chapter assignment. As I said earlier, I do not claim to be a neuroscientist. Much of the neuroscience aspect of this course, and project, is new information to me. I do find it very interesting, and it helps put a biological context to the psychology of what I've learned in other classes, though it can be hard to wrap my head around at times. This week I was fascinated with how much similarity there is between the brain systems used in processing music as are used in processing language (as my topic implies). Though specific areas of the brain can be "isolated" for different aspects of processing (hearing, production, etc.) they all essentially need to come together as one in order for the whole process to function properly (though we can see some functioning, with certain deficits present, after brain damage has occurred). One question was left with me through this week though. As a biology student, I am always wondering about how these processes would be seen in other organisms with similar, but slightly less complex brain systems. Biologists often try experiments on much simpler organisms, as long as the systems are close enough to ours that the results could still be generalized to human systems as well. I began to wonder what the simplest brain system that could process music AND language would be. It would likely not be a matter of understanding, but more a matter of observing actual brain activity, which implies a certain level of processing. Would this require a brain system with ALL of the parts used in human brains when processing language and music? Or, could brain activity be seen with only certain parts used in humans (or more simplistic versions of these structures)? I think it would be a really interesting research project to see the level of processing in very simple brain systems, and see what the minimal requirements for brain structures would be, or if processing could take place without all of these structures, just to a lesser degree. This may have been researched in the past, so I will continue to look throughout my research on the subject.

February 14 - 18 (and Break Week!! February 21-25)
This reflection is following a week of class, and a week off for spring break, which was mostly directed towards reading up, and preparing for the peer edit portion of the class project. The section that I reviewed was on Language and the Brain, and as I have said (surely many times) I am not a neuroscientist, so I am continually learning more and more about the brain and how it works through this class and the term project. It is so fascinating to see how the brain works under "normal" circumstances, but when you factor in language deficits (like aphasias, dyslexia, or problems like deafness or blindness), it is even more amazing to see how the brain adapts to overcome these problems. I learned about the different methods of viewing the brain through the various imaging techniques, which I have been exposed to in different biology classes, but was still interested to see in another context. I am familiar with these techniques, having worked in a medical clinic and constantly receiving reports and scans that were performed on various individuals. I know that each of these techniques are used under different circumstances. Each has its own benefits as well as risks. For example, CAT scans are commonly used, but involve radiation, whereas fMRI scans are safer and more widely available. Given all of the techniques available to us, and how far we have come in terms of our technological advances, it is still possible for mistakes to occur, or for things to be missed. In some cases, patients may have illnesses (maybe tumors or cancer) that are misread, or missed by the scans altogether. Luckily this is not a common occurrence, but at this stage, having come so far and having greatly refined these techniques, it's a wonder we have not managed to avoid or overcome these problems. My question is, what should be the next step? Is there some information that we still can't quite get from any of these techniques, where perhaps a newer technique needs to be developed? Is there any way to minimize the human error, and hopefully eliminate the mechanical error?

February 28 - March 4
I find the idea of speech errors very interesting. Obviously I make them all the time (as it is a very common mistake), and I have heard them many times from other people, but I never really knew about, or understood the underlying processes. I think my all-time favorite one (and my favorite "non-word") is stummy. It is a perfect example of sometimes our brain can be moving faster than our mouths, or vice versa, and all of a sudden we are saying something very different than what we intended. I think that each speech error (addition, deletion, exchange, anticipation, etc) is so interesting, each for their own reason. I find it really funny that sometimes I make these exact same mistakes when typing. I don't mean making simple typing mistakes, but actually typing out the words that we would say when we make speech errors (anticipation for example). I know that typing includes a whole new set of issues, when we get into motor skills and deficits or errors, but it still seems to be much more than coincidence. I began to wonder whether the brain processes that take place when we make speech production errors are similar, or the same as when we type these same words (ex: clarefully vs carefully, or platic vs plastic). Are the processes in our mind the same, or is it a simple case where our fingers can't keep up with what our brains want us to say or type? Regardless, I think that both cases are just another way which our brains keep us guessing, and another terrific example of the wonders of neuroscience!

March 7 - 11
I attended a music production this weekend, and some of the songs got me thinking about my topic for my text chapter. As I had discovered (and have mentioned on my "Music and Language" page), music is a culturally-based form of entertainment. When we listen to a piece of music, we often feel some tunes and melodies sound more "correct" and more enjoyable than others. Certain combinations of notes, rhythms, and songs are more likely to become popular in our culture than others. These songs, however, may NOT be the same combinations or tunes that would be most popular in other cultures. At the concert I attended, there were two or three songs that I really enjoyed, and the music sounded so wonderful, but there were two other songs that I could not get into at all. I found they strayed hugely from what we would consider "typical" music, and I felt that the sequences of notes didn't seem to go together properly at all! I was astonished that I could perceive any music (which is meant to be a form of expression) as "wrong", but I found myself almost immediately enjoying, or strongly disliking the tunes. I began to wonder what it was about our cultural knowledge of "correct" melodies that was making me feel this way. Is it simple exposure that makes us prefer some music over others? Do we get used to hearing certain types of music from a young age, so the familiarity gives us a sense of comfort, and anything outside of this is uncomfortable to our ears? Or is it more biologically-based, where genetics plays a role in how we react to music? Does reproduction within certain areas create differences in music preferences around the world, and genes come into play? Do our ears link up to certain neural networks that are created to allow us to remember the music we hear as children, and the infrequently used pathways get pruned away, leaving us feeling less favorable about these combinations of tones? All of these questions seem very important to my topic, and I have always simply accepted the cultural basis of music to be true without looking any further. I would like to research all of these questions this week to help enhance my knowledge of language and music.

March 14 - 18
I LOVED the lecture on gestures this week, because (for as long as I can remember), people who constantly gesture while they talk have been absolutely fascinating to me. These "hand-talkers" seem (usually) completely oblivious to the fact that their hands are going a mile a minute, as if independant from the rest of their body!! I think I took interest in this phenomenom from an early age because my mom is a typical hand-talker. I was interested to realize how many cultural (as well as universal) gestures, or "emblems", there are. As with my topic of language and music, many of these are cultural, but within that culture the gestures would be readily recognized. There are also people (or "icons") who act the same way as emblems or symbols do, representing a whole concept or idea. It is so amazing to consider! Again, like my topic of music, I realized that gesturing has a beat, or rhythm of a sort, and we tend to gesture along with the emphasis of our speech. It gives our language and gestures a song-like quality.

Again, I was so taken with the ideas of Anomia and Tip-of-the-tongue state. It was said that restricting gesturing during TOT state led to less successful retrievals. I began to wonder whether people who gesture a lot begin to rely on their gesturing to jog their memories and remember what they're saying. Perhaps if you have a tendency to use a lot of hand gestures, you are relying on these gestures more than people who don't tend to use their hands when talking. I wonder if restricting "hand-talkers" hands (and preventing gesturing) during regular speech and conversations would actually CAUSE more TOT state, and more errors in speech. It would be a really interesting experiment to try. Maybe even people who don't think they gesture a lot would be surprised to find how hard it would be to try to talk without gesturing at all.

March 21 - March 25
This week, I was particularly impressed with the guest lecture we had about aphasias. I had no idea that aphasia was so prevalent in society (~10,000 new cases a year was the figure stated), and as the lecturer theorized, this could be due to the fact that aphasia affects communication abilities, obviously making it nearly impossible for victims to advocate as is seen with other illnesses. I also didn't realize that aphasia could affect people so young (sometimes as young as 18 years old). It is so sad to think about the devastating effects this would have on the person's life, as well as the lives of their family.

The thing I was particularly impressed with was being able to actually see videos of aphasia victims. I have learned about Non-fluent (expressive), and Fluent (receptive) aphasias in other psychology classes, but always had a bit of a hard time visualizing what this would actually look like. It was so helpful to see videos of actual aphasia sufferers, and how they act and interact, as well as try to cope with the problem. The lecture also touched on some of the aggressive therapy options which were fascinating. Most of the recovery that is going to take place will happen in the first year, although some gains can be made after that (they just seem to be less significant and much less rapid). I was wondering whether (as a therapist) it would be "easier" to treat patients with non-fluent, or fluent aphasia. I am sure that each comes with its own set of challenges, but whether one was more difficult? Also, whether (on average) more significant overall recovery was seen in non-fluent or in fluent aphasia patients?

I wasn't as familiar with the type of aphasia known as "Global Aphasia", where the victim has both expressive AND receptive difficulties. This was the most amazing video we saw, as the patient essentially had one phrase which he used to communicate every idea (and even those were very limited). In my mind it seemed a little bit like having a baby to talk to, because they speak a different "language", don't understand what you're saying to them (aside from non-verbal cues), and have trouble expressing themselves, though they seem to be able to understand what they want to say. It must be very frustrating to lose someone to this type of aphasia. I was wondering how you would treat a person like this, or whether you would have to basically start from scratch (as you would with a very young child learning to communicate? Cna they ever reach a point where they are able to speak more words, and understand others again? Why is it that sometimes global aphasia will resolve itself into non-fluent or fluent aphasia, and other times it won't?

March 28 - April 1
This week, we have been debating...and I LOVE it! It is great to see some of the major issues in psycholinguistics, and to hear the most compelling arguments for each side. I am also learning a lot about some of the chapter topics that I was less familiar with, which is very interesting too!

One of the most interesting things that I have gotten from the debates thus far (my group included), is that if you boil each topic down to it's bare essentials, they all seem to come down to whether we should standardize one particular method to use for every person, or whether we should allow different groups to operate differently. For ebonics: should all children learn English, or should some schools teach ebonics as well? Should we use Fast ForWord in schools, or are there other programs that may work better? Should children with cochlear implants use only oral communication, or should some be able to use total communication as well? In my mind, it seems that for each debate, one group wants one method, while the other group is advocating for a "to each their own" method.

I began thinking about what sort of headway was being made in the real-wold applications of these debates? Who gets to make these decisions? Should it be the government, the family, the children, the community, the country? Likely these questions would be well assessed in an ethics class, but the implications of each do come up throughout the debates. I found myself having a hard time imagining saying that, in one case, a particular method should be standardized and used for everyone, but in another case, everyone should make their own individual decisions on what works best for them. These are the types of things that come up though, as certain situations and circumstances are different than others. However, for the ebonics debate, Dr. Newman mentioned that this had been an issue when we were younger, so I did wonder what the result of that debate had ultimately been (as it was never hinted at). I know the cochlear implant debate is still very evenly divided as well. Clearly, these are hot-topic issues, and the ethical repercussions of each decision is a very interesting (as well as complicated) point to consider. For example, should cost be an issue in cases with great benefits? What are the physical or emotional risks?

April 4 - 8 (THE END!!)
This will be my last blog post, and the end of my semester in Psycholinguistics.

If I'm being completely honest, I originally took this class because it fulfilled my last requirement to graduate. Now, as I write my last assignment for the course, I can confidently say it was my favorite course of the semester, and quite possibly the whole year! I came in knowing nothing about linguistics, and having a very minimal neuroscience background, and (quite frankly) I was terrified, and dreading what my fate in this course would be.

My one criticism of the psychology courses at Dalhousie would be that they cater to students who are really good at writing exams. Most (though not all) of my psych courses are graded on nothing more than 2 or 3 (4 if you're really lucky), multiple choice exams. Speaking as a student who feels much more confident in submitting smaller assignments spaced throughout the year, I am far from fond of the set-up. I was so excited when Dr. Newman announced that our project would be a wikiversity page. I loved the format of the class, and I felt that I learned more in this course, and with this design of grading than I have in courses with a few exams. Though our chapters focused on one area, we were still required to learn about the other areas through lectures, debates, guest lectures and learning exercises. We also had to familiarize ourselves with another chapter for our peer review. My one question is....what about next year?? Perhaps the students will edit our chapters, or complete our learning exercises?? It would certainly be interesting to hear how Dr. Newman decides to shape the course for the next group!

Through this semester, the class taught me how to draw links across topics (within this course), as well as to make connections about things we'd learned here and similar topics we'd covered in other courses (I impressed many Anthropology classmates when I told them about the language of Toki Pona!). The learning exercise forced me to look beyond the obvious information, and to try to draw conclusions by looking across many different fields. How do you teach someone, while also furthering their understanding so they will really remember the material?? (maybe Dr. Newman was giving us a taste of how he feels!)

Overall, I could not be happier with my experience in this class. The grade I receive will truly reflect the amount of work I put into the class, and how much I learned (as opposed to how well I memorized the material and can write a multiple choice exam). I haven't had the opportunity to debate in many of my other classes, and I was a bit resistant to the idea at first, but I thought it was a fantastic way to learn about the real-world arguments in the field!

Thank you, Dr. Newman. I am recommending this class to any upcoming psychology students!