User:Chantel


 * I am a third year psychology major in the undergraduate program at Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. I plan to pursue my PhD in Clinical Psychology upon the completion of my honours degree next year.  I planned on completing my degree in Pharmacy up until the fall of 2008, when I realized that my real interest was the thought processes and behaviours of clinical populations rather than the specific medications used to regulate those thoughts and behaviours.


 * I chose to take the psycholinguistics course this semester because I think language is an intriguing human ability that I want to learn more about. I also have a friend taking speech pathology at the University of British Columbia and I would like to have a greater understanding of the topics she studies.

January 10th-14th

 * From the lectures we had this week, the lectures on the influence of language in thought and our conceptualization of language itself, were the lectures that struck me. When the class was asked for our definition of ‘language’ earlier in the week, I realized that I had never really considered, in depth, the accuracy of my existing definition.  I thought I could answer simply - language is French, English, every other spoken dialect.   It is the words that come out of my mouth and my mode of communication with others.  However, after our class discussion I realized that language is also much more than that.  Language encompasses a broader range and is not necessarily spoken nor an exchange between humans.  I suppose it is the egocentric tendency, that so often accompanies being human, that caused my failure to initially acknowledge such important aspects in my definition of language.  I am glad that so early in the course I have once again been humbled and made aware of how much more I have to learn.


 * I also found it phenomenal when we discussed language acquisition by animals and the subsequent changes that occurred in those animals’ abilities to learn other behaviours through observation. The paradox of experience shaping our thought processes and our thought processes affecting the way we interpret our experiences fascinates me.  When asked to act in a demonstration in a replication of an experiment on spatial frame of reference performed by Pederson et al. (1998), I thought nothing of it – I simply completed the simple task without much thought.  However, once Dr. Newman pointed out that my completion of the task deviated from relative frame of reference of many people in Western society, I was thoroughly puzzled by my apparent difference.  Being the over-analytical person that I am, I spent the whole walk home contemplating possible reasons for this difference and my conclusion was that experience has indeed altered the way I think.  Growing up on the prairies, more specifically on a farm, engrained the importance of the cardinal directions.  Land does not have an address similar to the conventional city addresses.  Instead it is marked using cardinal directions and their use is common when giving instructions on how to reach a location. For example, the address of some of my family’s land is Northwest 16, 16, 15, West of 2, which is comparable to saying that Dalhousie University is located at 6206 University Avenue.  My resulting familiarity with the cardinal directions has obviously changed the way I think and in turn my behaviours.

January 17th-21st

 * The first lecture this week on the lateralization of the brain and the specific language deficits that occur with damage to different areas of the brain, allowed me to draw some interesting parallels to a book I am currently reading. I am currently reading the book The Siege by Clara Claiborne Park, which chronicles the first eight years of life of an Autistic child named Ellie, in the United States during the late 1950's/early 1960's. At this point in time, little is known about Autism which results in very few resources being available to the family, leaving the family to seek ways to further the development of their child on their own. One chapter considers language specifically and the child's reluctance to embrace it. The mother in the family (who happens to also be the writer of the book) mentions that her child, at four years old, has a vocabulary of far less than a hundred words. She also discusses how if spoken to Ellie may repeat words much later - often in an inappropriate context - but rarely immediately following the demonstration. This point drew similarities to some of the different aphasias discussed in class and their varying deficits in language perception and production.


 * Similarly, in the book the mother mentions that later research had found that even after a child with Autism acquires language, it is common for them to think in concrete terms and lack the ability to understand irony, jokes, or satire. In class, Dr. Newman mentioned that the functions of the right hemisphere in language include: emotion, metaphor (jokes, irony, etc.), as well as other functions. It occurred to me that this area of the brain seems to be responsible for many of the areas that children with Autism appear to lack in. These parallels made me wonder if research has found specific deficits in the functioning of the right hemisphere of people with Autism, or any other areas for that matter. I have yet to have time to do a search for this information myself.

January 24th-28th

 * This week’s lectures began with a look at acoustic phonetics and then continued on to review the role of segmentation in the perception of speech. The first two lectures of this week really highlighted for me the amazing capabilities of the human brain.  I sometimes find that I quickly get caught up in the intricate tasks that the newest technological gadgets can complete and often ignore the far more complex tasks that are carried out by humans every day.  Few things have made me step back and appreciate the inner workings of my own mind and body (which I should do more); however the lectures on speech perception did just that.  The extreme lack in speech recognition technology in computers and the ability of the human brain to “fill in the blanks” when given segments of words or information were only two examples of this.


 * I also found the influence of taught down knowledge on speech perception to be particularly fascinating. The impact that environmental experience plays on all aspects of development astounds me. I cannot even begin to imagine all the numerous and complex ways each of my experiences may have affected any aspect of my development, let alone speech perception.  The complexity of human language, and more generally the human brain, is a wonderful thing and has made me realize that I should appreciate the brilliant minds behind the latest technological advancement much more so than the technology itself.

January 31st-February 4th

 * The lecture on Monday covered morphology/morphemes and their role in linguistics. While discussing the many morphological rules and the information carried by each unit, the idea of children making mistakes using these rules during language acquisition is common.  When Dr. Newman discussed inflection in ASL, I could not help but wonder if children who are acquiring ASL make comparable mistakes to children acquiring spoken English language.  I think I have gained a decent understanding of language acquisition in typically developing children from previous classes I have taken in child development and the general strategies they have been shown to do (ex: use of assimilation, accommodation); however I know little to nothing about language acquisition in deaf children.  I would love to know more about ASL in general - its rules, common mistakes, etc. - and in particular the way children acquire ASL and the mistakes and challenges that come along with it.

February 7th-11th

 * In this week’s lectures I was especially struck by the lecture on syntax and the intricacies involved in understanding and forming sentences or phrases. When shown the video of Watson, at first I was unimpressed.  I overlooked the complexity of understanding a question when it is embedded in a statement.  Once I considered this fact, I found it unbelievable that the program was not simply typing in a question verbatim and retrieving an answer, but rather it was pulling apart a statement to find an underlying statement.  This introduction to the capabilities of the human brain blew me away.  I understood a little about perception of speech from earlier lectures; however this lecture left me with questions as to where this information is stored and how it is pulled apart.  The discussion of Jabiwaki also added to these thoughts and made me question how robust the organizational rules we have for language must be in order to create apparent understanding out of nonsense.  I wonder what the limitations are to this system and how our brains can be so robust in some areas, yet so vulnerable to other complexities.

February 14th-18th

 * In last week’s lectures the topic of false memories was brought up when we began the discussion of discourse. This topic interested me right away because it has been discussed in almost all of my courses at some point in time, including forensic psychology and social psychology.  This fact made me revisit the idea that our brains go through many processes to interpret input from our environment.  I also was reminded that these processes are so complex and influenced so heavily by environmental factors.  The way that a topic can span so many fields of psychology and be relevant in all areas is a testament to the intertwined nature of psychological processes.  Though, when discussing false memories this class new questions arose for me.  I know that the concept of false memories is a very touchy subject in the legal system and has been since a series of false memory cases were connected to hypnosis back in the 1980’s.  However, I began to wonder if other forms of ‘persuasive conversation’ or social contexts should be just as questionable.  In class we discussed the varying ways information can be presented by a speaker and how some ways are more ‘effective’ than others and I couldn’t help but wonder if some of these ways may be just as questionable as hypnosis when it comes to a legal setting.

February 28th-March 4th

 * This week I was talking to my friend who is enrolled in a graduate speech pathology program at UBC. She mentioned to me that her class had previously been working with young children with speech impediments, but were now working with adults who had suffered trauma and required assessment and rehabilitation.  I was blown away by the stories she told me, including one about a woman who had cancer in her mouth and had to have part of her tongue removed in an attempt to control the spread of the cancer.  When learning about Aphasics and other people with speech loss in class, I don’t think I really connected the amount of distress that would accompany such a loss.  I was taken aback by the sadness of these people’s stories and the struggles they would have to endure in an attempt to regain their speech.  I know that speech pathologists are available to help those with these type of struggles but I wondered what other psychological help may be available for these people.  I think, based on how big of a role language plays in our lives, the loss of language would cause huge emotional changes and loss.

March 7th-11th

 * During our discussion of writing this week, Dr. Newman told us that writing has evolved over time from pictographs, to logographs, to rebus writing, to phonetic-based writing. In a religious studies class I took while in university, the professor suggested that over time religions have evolved and across many religions the evolutions seen in an individual religion show obvious similarities to other religions.  My professor also noted that these similarities tended to follow a similar evolutionary time period even though they happened across very distinct religions, cultures, and in many cases geographical locations.  Dr. Newman mentioned in our class that the same evolution of writing has occurred across many, if not most, cultures.  I was wondering if the time period of these evolutions happened at similar points across cultures or if perhaps a cascading effect occurred as a result of trade and interactions between cultures.  Overall, I would be very interested to see a timeline of the acquisition of these different types of writing styles by different cultures and would like to inspect the possible cause of the presence of such overlaps.

March 14th-18th

 * In a class this week on language development, Dr. Newman mentioned that children first learn the names of objects that are manipulable, relevant, and interesting. When I thought about the experiences of my nieces and nephew during their development, I realized that these principles directly applied to them as well.  I thought that it is logical that those things that children commonly interact with and that easily capture their attention would be something that they would want to learn to name quite quickly.  When I thought about the topic further, I realized that these same principles are what directed their learning as they grew as well (including many areas outside of language acquisition).  I started to wonder if these principles, which were obtained through research, are applied to educational strategies.  It would seem that if a child acquires some of their first knowledge based on how manipulable, relevant, and interesting something is, than these same principles should make acquiring more complex and abstract knowledge much easier.  I would like to know how much these principles have been applied to human learning studies or if research in other forms of learning has found the same qualities to be important.  I can see some parallels between these principles and the avocation of ‘hands-on-learning’ and I wonder if they originated from similar bodies of research.

March 22nd-26th

 * This week we had a guest lecturer who spoke to us about her experiences working with people who have a variety of different aphasias. I found that the most important points that she raised (all that I was unaware of) were that many people with aphasias are not elderly and that the number of people with aphasia is far more than those with Parkinson’s, yet people are far less aware of it.  This point boggled me and I tested the point by asking my family and friends what they knew about the disease – not surprisingly very few knew anything.  The whole thing has struck a chord with me and bothered me a lot.  I feel upset that there are disorders and diseases with such high prevalence that are not given the attention, and in turn the funding, that they should have simply because the media has not caught on.  I have been wondering what happens in the division of government funding for research and therapy for these types of disorders.  Do disorders highly endorsed by the media receive more funding for research and therapy programs?  I am particularly interested to know if, when budget cuts are made – which they inevitably are – if these lesser known (but equally important) disorders and diseases lose funding first.  I understand that there is only so much media coverage that can be given to disorders; however I just find it incredibly unfortunate that disorders that are so prevalent are being underrepresented.

March 29th-April 1st

 * This week debates were going on in our class that revolved around some of the controversial issues in linguistics. The debates made me think of some of the other issues in linguistics that are commonly debated and inspired me to look up more information on some of them.  One interesting thing I found was that it was not uncommon for both sides of a debate to cite the same previous study as support for their side of the debate.  In fact, often times I found that either side of the debate would pick and choose through the information or interpret the results of a single study in a way that supported their side.  At the same time, the other side of the debate seemed to follow the same procedure.  Particularly, I found that this happened quite a bit with the controversy over the existence of the LAD.  In terms of the class debates, the use of the same sources was clear in the debate on Ebonics.


 * When considering the fact that this overlapping use of data occurs, I tried to think of ways to prevent it from happening. At first I thought that perhaps more clarity by the author of the work as to their intentions and conclusions may be a key factor.  However, I quickly realised that the fact that others can draw different conclusions from someone’s work may actually be a good thing because those who conducted the study may be biased to see the conclusions in a certain way.  The problem of bi-directionality is examined by others and the ability to draw different conclusions from the same data set seems to be a positive way to evaluate all possible explanations for a phenomenon.


 * Even though I came to the conclusion that having two sides of a debate draw support from the same data set was a positive thing, I really would like to know how the scientific community feels about this. Do scientists involved in these debates believe that data clearly shows evidence of only one thing or the other?  Do they get frustrated when data is not clean cut and obvious in its results?  Or do the results of data and the conclusions drawn from them depend on the experimental design and if so can the design bias the results?

April 4th-9th

 * In general, I really enjoyed the content of this class and the format of the class was a nice change from the typical class layout. However, I think it may have been useful to have some percentage of the overall grade allotted to in-class participation.  I noticed that after the first few classes, many students very rarely came to class.  In fact, I am pretty sure a few never came to class because I was surprised to see them and did not know who they were when they came for their debates.  I think if the ‘no midterm, no final’ class design remains, it may be necessary to implement an in-class participation strategy in order to keep people coming to class regularly.  Also, I am not sure that the textbook was particularly helpful within the context of the current class format.  I had the textbook and tried to do most readings prior to class, but I found that at times when I did not have time to read the textbook, I still gained just as much clarity on the topics from your slides without the readings.  I also know a few friends who didn’t even have the textbook and didn't take notes in lecture and still managed to excel in the class.  I think that perhaps a way of checking a student’s overall comprehension of the topics discussed, rather than just their chapter topic may be needed.  Overall though, I really appreciated the change in typical class format.