User:Grechukk

I am a fourth year student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, majoring in Psychology. I have taken several classes pertaining to the subject of languages/linguistics and am excited to learn more about the topic from a psychological perspective in the Psycholinguistics (PSYO3190) class I am currently enrolled in at Dalhousie. I love working with children, especially special needs children, so am aspiring to combine all of my interests and become a speech-language pathologist and work with special needs children. The Psycholinguistics class at Dalhousie will be writing a Wikiversity textbook, and I will be responsible for the chapter on Acoustic Phonetics. I am excited to take an in-depth look at this topic and share what I learn with the cyber-world.

January 10, 2011
I was very intrigued by the discussion of Kanzi the Bonobo chimp and his language-learning journey. Although there are many differences between humans and chimps, I couldn't help but see some similarities between the characteristics of Kanzi's language abilities and the language abilities of a low-functioning child with autism. I am not generalizing all people with autism, but have worked with some children with autism who, like Kanzi, use language exclusively as a way to obtain a need or desire. It has been suggested that Bonobos thought patterns are altered by language acquisition, enabling them to acquire more high-order functions (e.g. Kanzi could understand and play Pacman). That being said, one may assume that instinctive language learning abilities can provide nothing but advantageous thought patterns, but is it possible we are missing something because of our thought pattern? Of course I understand the vitality of language in order to best function in our society, but a common pattern of thinking found in those with language learning instincts, I believe, can be highlighted when you look at people with autism. Generally speaking, those with autism struggle to learn language and as it is difficult for most people to understand them, they have a hard time understanding others. Very similarly to typical Bonobos versus language-acquired Bonobos, typical brains seem to be wired differently compared to the brains of those with autism spectrum disorders. I think it is important for the world to realize this and make note of its specialness. For example, had it not been for this difference in wiring Temple Grandin may not have made such tremendous strides in the agricultural world. She has stated that her success had stemmed from her alternative way of thinking. Many other great minds have also been speculated to lie on the autism spectrum (Mozart, Einstein, Newton, to name a few; however, these theories are controversial and viewed quite skeptically by many). On this note, I will ask again: is it possible we, the typical language learners of humanity, are missing something because of our thought pattern? I believe the answer, undoubtedly, is yes. Maybe there is more that we can learn from these chimps.

January 21, 2011
Learning to fluently speak and understand a new language later in life seems amazing when you take prosody into account. Prosody helps a listener to segment a phrase into individual words and sounds that can be given meaning. Things become tricky when you realize how much prosody can vary from one language to the next. That being said, understanding fluency and melody (AKA prosody) of one language and being able to use it to help you better understand and segment speech in that language does not mean you can rely on the same cues for learning and understanding a different language. I wondered if it helps, though, to know more than one language? I’ve heard that the more languages you know, the easier it can be to learn some, often selective, other languages but always thought it was because of grammatical similarities. I never really took prosody into account and now believe it cannot be ruled out. As previously stated, prosody is like a melody or a song. Those who play one or more instruments are usually more musically inclined than someone who cannot play any music, and therefore are more likely to readily pick up new instruments. Could it be this way for speech? Could practice make perfect, in the sense that the more languages you know, the more sensitive you are to prosodic cues? I think it must be true. Take learning your times tables, for example: it is a conscious effort at first but the task soon becomes effortless and prepares you for different types of math problems. Thinking a little deeper, I wondered if the musically inclined are more perceptive to prosodic cues and therefore learn not only different types of music but also language more easily. Upon further inspection I found studies (e.g. Thompson, Schellenberg & Husain (2003)) that lead to the conclusion that musicians are indeed more receptive to prosodic cues and more likely to extract information from these cues. Thompson, Schellenberg & Husain (2004) later linked these findings more specifically to the emotional cues of prosody when they found that both music and drama lessons helped when trying to identify emotion of the speaker. So, although I am not sure if knowledge of music could help you to learn the grammatical aspects of language, it seems to help one to understand prosody and therefore the messages being spoken by others. It may be quite a long shot, but maybe music could help those who are anti-social to better function around people and within society by giving them a better understanding of emotion. Food for thought.

THOMPSON, W. F., SCHELLENBERG, E. G. and HUSAIN, G. (2003). Perceiving Prosody in Speech. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 999, 530–532. doi: 10.1196/annals.1284.06.

THOMPSON, W. F., SCHELLENBERG, E. G. and HUSAIN, G. (2004). Decoding Prosody: Do Music Lessons Help?. Emotion, 4(1), 46-64. doi: 10.1037/1528-3542.4.1.46.

January 29, 2011
Our textbook, The Pyschology of Language by Timothy B. Jay, notes that Read (1981) found that early spelling attempts to show what children hear in speech. What children hear is quite relative though, which gives variation to the attempted spelling we see in young, elementary school-age children. Obviously dialect could play a role in determining regional variations (e.g. a young Cape Bretoner may think to spell the number three like “tree,” how it is sometimes pronounced by those with thick Cape Breton accents, but a child from Toronto probably will not make this mistake, at least not for that reason), but from where do the personal variations arise? Could it stem from a process similar to the allophone-phoneme relationships that vary from language to language? If that is the case, children over-generalize sounds and have different schemas for similar sounds. If a child is not familiar with the “mb” combination in “number” (i.e. has never heard other, more uncommon words with this combination like “combination” or “lumber” for example), he or she may implicitly assume that the “mb” sound is an allophone for the phoneme /b/ and spell number as “nuber” or a similar way missing the letter m. It is interesting and almost robotic how learning to read seems to shape these schemas to be equivalent among all literate people of a language, and a lot of this learning process seems to depend on memory in English. Using an example presented in class, there is no way to figure out the proper spelling of “yacht” because the grapheme-phoneme relationship is so weak – one must simply remember it’s spelling. It was also brought up in class that Turkish has a very strong grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC), and English does not. This made me wonder if there is any difference between the memories of speakers of a language depending on the GPC of that language, for example English speakers versus Turkish speakers. The GPC must affect the complexity of a language, and does one’s way of thinking change depending on the complexity of the language(s) they speak? If this were the case, would the world be different if we all spoke different languages? I highly doubt the difference in thinking is so drastic that it could have a world-changing effect, or even a person-changing effect, but it may alter peoples’ perspectives.

February 6, 2011
In class on Monday, January 31, we talked about morphology and realized the languages of the world are largely diverse. We learned that languages lie on a typological continuum ranging from extremely analytic (like Chinese, where whole words represent morphemes and have a low morpheme-word ratio) to very polysynthetic (like some Native languages, where each word contains many morphemes and have a high morpheme-word ratio). Thinking about the morphological diversity alone, I became amazed when I realized just how complex languages are without even taking phonology, prosody, or aspects of language other than morphology into account. I then realized that this diversity could allow for new languages to be invented, which is extraordinary considering there are already approximately 6900 languages in the world. Yet, despite the diversity, when it all comes down to it, all languages are saying the same things/expressing the same message (i.e. whatever you can say in one language, you can say the same thing in another language, just in a different way). Every language is productive and can come up with new sentences and express new things, which means all languages can convey the same ideas. For instance, think about the phrase "I have a headache": it only has one meaning, but this meaning could be expressed in at least 6900 different ways in the world, not including variations within a language (e.g. "my head hurts" conveys a similar idea or message). Although a sentence like “We are supposed to get 20 cm of snow tomorrow” is not unusually heard here in Canada, it would probably not be heard in Tanzania, but it is still possible to say it in Swahili. I think this is extremely fascinating. Is there an infinite amount of possible languages, or a limit so high it might as well be infinite? Technically, I believe changing one aspect/rule of a language could create a novel language; it would just be very similar to another. If you think about swapping even one rule of one language with the rule of another, and did this for all 6900 languages, there is a possibility for a lot of new languages to be developed. Now try swapping two, and three, and the number quickly reaches infinity, or very close to it. To put things in perspective, the animal kingdom does not even nearly contain the same possibilities. It is crazy to think that this small part of the animal kingdom (it really only applies to humans, and is only one of the many special characteristics of humans) can be more diverse than the kingdom itself. The more I learn about language, the more it fascinates me.

February 11, 2011
Breaking down and understanding grammar involves breaking sentences into smaller, meaningful pieces (parsing). Additionally, one must use their working memory to remember the meaning of each segment and how it relates to each part of the sentence. That being said, working memory must have an effect on the ability to understand grammar. Does decreased working memory decrease a person's ability to understand grammar and language? This alone would debunk Chomsky's notion that the grammar of a language is perfectly hard-wired in the brain of a native speaker. I realize it is core content words that one uses (or can possibly rely on, depending on the complexity of the sentence) to understand a sentence, but if working memory plays such a big role, what happens to patients who lose their short term memory due to a traumatic brain injury? Things must lie on a continuum; I am not convinced that grammar comprehension is all or nothing. I believe this continuum must be at least partially based on working memory. Going back to the idea of memory loss, this can indeed happen in varying degrees. Some people may lose working memory, some may lose long-term memory, some may lose both. Also, one's memory loss may be sporadic or conditional, as in the case of people with Alzheimer's disease. Memory loss can also differ in severity. In this case, one person may be able to comprehend longer sentences than others, but it would depend on the functioning of their working memory. However, I don't believe this continuum exists only for those with memory loss. There was an interesting question posed in class about run-on sentences that really got me thinking. We realized that run-on sentences are often grammatically correct but discouraged in order to limit confusion. This seems like a very subjective concept. What really defines the limits of sentence length? If it's true they are unaccustomed only to avoid confusion, the grammatical abilities of the reader/listener must set the constraints on sentence length. If breaking down sentences, remembering the smaller parts and reattaching them to infer a greater meaning is how we understand a sentence, then the whole meaning of a sentence depends strongly on working memory. Those with better working memories should be able to link more clauses together and understand the full meaning of longer sentences. Also, the sentence "The horse raced past the barn fell," used as an example in class, could exhibit a possible continuum in a different way. This sentence would not require as much working memory, as it is not a very long sentence, but would rely on deriving possibly meaning of parsed portions of sentences and properly connecting these meanings - another major ability needed to fully understand grammar. The sentence is not implicitly understood and was probably easier for some to understand than others. Let's be honest, some people still may be a little confused by it - I know it took some thinking to really follow it myself! The thinking part also suggests that understanding grammar may not be as implicit as once speculated. Therefore, I see this as real-time proof that Chomsky's idea is wrong. Additionally, I am beginning to realize the importance of working memory in one's life. I also saw and highlighted it's benefits on January 29 when I wrote about grapheme-phoneme correspondence. Who knew it had a greater use than cramming for an exam?! Let's just hope that using it, strengthens it, and makes it last so that us students can continue optimally functioning in life for a long time.

February 20, 2011
The topic of discourse discussed this week was very interesting to me. We discussed many aspects and theories, such as the fact that it could be organized and understood in very different ways depending on the language being used. This really made me wonder about what makes language so universal. The only thing that seems common among all languages is that it is used to communicate. Things like syntax, phonetics, phonology and even the letters used are variable. To me, this is fascinating. Similarly, discourse itself can be organized in different ways to convey different, or like meanings. Using an example from our textbook (Jay, 2003), there is coherence between the two sentences: “My uncle drank too much last night. He lost his job yesterday.” Coherence allows one to assume that the two sentences are related and combine their meanings to create something like a story. A major question involved in this process is: how do we combine this information and understand the ultimate message being conveyed? Do we continually add the information together, or do certain words prime all possible meanings and proceeding words eliminate certain meanings? Additionally, how do we all come to the same conclusion? Can we even ever know for sure that there is mutual understanding in a conversation? The subjectivity involved in discourse is what intrigues me most. Understanding discourse must depend on experience; otherwise why aren’t we all always “on the same page.” Why must we explain things multiple times to some people, but not others, and why does saying things a different way allow some people to better understand, even though the meaning does not change? Take jokes and riddles as an example – some people are better at solving them. Why is this? I think that more creativity or exposure to jokes/riddles could definitely play a part. If it is based on creativity, are people born with this predisposition? Is it something that develops? I think it must be associated with “thinking outside the box,” as this would allow people to consider more possible meanings for a given discourse. I’ve heard of people often associating creativity more strongly with left-handed individuals. Left-handed individuals are also more likely to show right-hemispheric dominance – could there be a link here? Maybe those with language dominance in the right hemisphere, who are more likely to be left-handed, are more likely to be creative, and because of this are more likely to understand discourse? Or is understanding discourse based on experience? I’ve talked a lot about my realization of the major role working memory can have in language comprehension. If this is the case for discourse, long-term memory must also be involved. This would mean that one understands discourse because they’ve already heard the statement, or something similar. More experience would allow one to entertain more possible meanings. However, this would require us to recall every statement we’ve ever heard to understand something new and/or recent. It would make more sense for us to use both tactics, and combine statements, creatively and categorically, as they come. This theory can lead to more questions, though. If we use creativity to categorize topics/statements, we can be sure that everyone’s categories will be different. Thus, how can one be sure we truly understand one another? Even though two people can agree that some discourse makes sense and that they both understand what it means, can we really be sure we are all “on the same page?” It is entirely possible that certain things can differ in meaning for different people. This displays how complex this one aspect of language can be. The more I learn, the harder time I have understanding psycholinguistics as my mind opens to vast amounts of avenues and possibilities.

Jay, T. (2003). The Psychology of Language. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

March 6, 2011
After editing my classmate’s chapter on Hemispheric Lateralization, I felt enlightened. My mind was racing, I was very intrigued and one “what-if” was leading to another. The part of the chapter concerning the Right Hemisphere is what I think intrigued me most. My classmate highlighted the fact that “the right hemisphere is most often responsible for the prosodic and emotional elements of speech and language (Purves et al., 2008). “ These things could be related to the pragmatic aspects of language, as understanding prosody and emotion within language can help one to pick up on social cues and/or underlying meaning of what is being said; they help take language out of a most literal context. I wondered if people with Down syndrome, who are typically known to have strong pragmatic understanding but are often lacking in other areas of language, are more right-hemisphere dominant as far as language is concerned? Also, what about those with autism who can sometimes display the total opposite: major lack of pragmatic ability, but possibly in tact abilities in many or all other areas of language? I thought that this might also apply, to a lesser extent, to males versus females. Females are generally known to be more in touch with their emotions, so I thought it might be possible that females have more right hemispheric lateralization than males. As I continued through the chapter I learned that women tend to have larger corpus callosums compared to men, creating a stronger connection between the right and left hemisphere. Thus, is it possible that people with autism have smaller corpus collosums than most men? Autism is more prevalent in males than in females, which would further support this idea – even if a woman had a smaller than average corpus callosum, it would probably be less likely to be smaller than the average male. If this is true, I wonder what the influences it’s growth? I realize this is a loaded question and if the answer were so cut and dry, would not have so many people suffering from social isolation associated autism spectrum disorders. However, I think it would be very interesting to investigate this idea – maybe it would lead to big things!

March 13, 2011
I really enjoyed last Wednesday’s class on gestures. We watched a Sylvester & Tweety cartoon and I realized that Sylvester never speaks and simply uses gestures to communicate. I watched Sylvester and Tweety a lot growing up so I was surprised that this was the first time I thought about this fact, and also even more fascinated at how well he has to communicate with gestures for it to go unnoticed. I think that often, gestures do go unnoticed in a conversation, yet, as we saw with Sylvester, they can convey so much information that it surprises me. That being said, it seems we must implicitly process and understand most gestures. Since they are often used for social purposes, I wondered whether those with autism understand gestures implicitly? Are they helpful to them? Gestures are sometimes more straightforward in speech because they do not have factors such as pitch or intonation that can change their meaning (e.g. in the case of questions), so would this help or hinder understanding in those with autism? I know that signing is often used for purposes of communication, especially those with low-functioning autism, but some people in this population take things so extremely literally that I think it may be possible that a gesture could confuse them. I would hypothesize that a lot of people with autism would not benefit from or understand gestures such as emblems (e.g. the middle finger), but use of metaphorics, which are used with things of more abstract meaning (e.g. time), may be helpful for their understanding. Furthermore, we recognized that gestures are probably most often used to help the speaker formulate words and externalize their ideas so that the listener best understands their message. I wondered just how implicit and universal gestures are – do people who are blind gesture? They would never have had the chance to learn gestures by seeing them used by another person, so if they do, do they use the same gestures as others? I think that gestures can be so important for communication, and when you realize their complexity it is amazing how naturally they are processed and used.

March 20, 2011
Wednesday's lecture on segmental boundaries and the development of speech really got my wheels turning. First of all, I find it amazing that babies can segment speech at all. For example, it was mentioned that they begin to realize that certain sounds cannot occur together, the example used in class being /c/ and /t/. However, what about the word act? This isn't even the most uncommon word, and I am sure it is used quite a bit around young children. If speech acquiring babies have older brothers or sister's, I am sure the phrase "Act like a big boy/girl" is said around them on a fairly regular basis. I think that these "uncommon" gatherings of sounds are quite subjective, and that there must be more cues being used when one is learning to speak and attempting to segment speech. It is speculated that infants 6 months old are quite sensitive to word boundaries, but it is not until around 9 months of age that they can discriminate stress patterns within a language. To me, this was very intriguing. I would have thought that it would be the opposite, especially since some sounds that occur together in one language are against the rules of another. For instance, there is a common last name "Nkrumah" in Africa, but this /n/ and /k/ combination does not really happen word initially in English. The name of the former Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, would probably be segmented improperly by a native English speaker from Canada. Based on common Canadian English, it would make more sense to segment his name as "Kwa Menkru Mah." However, I had no trouble understanding his true name when I heard it spoken to me, and I think it is because of the stress patterns. Ghanaians still speak English, but some of their words break the rules of our Canadian English. Would this mean that a baby first understands dialect, and then works up to understand a particular language more generally? Wouldn't this put babies who are spoken to in multiple languages behind for sure, because they would be exposed to more combinations of words and thus have a more difficult time identifying word boundaries, seeing as how these combinations can often be language specific? I really speculated that identifying stress patterns would come before identifying word boundaries, especially since "motherese" so prominently highlights stress patterns and pitch. I believe this is definitely something to think about; babies never cease to amaze me!

March 26, 2011
On March 25, 2011, our Psycholinguistics class had the pleasure of learning about aphasia from Linda Wozniak of Dalhousie's School of Human Communication Disorders. I was completely amazed with the videos and facts she told us and immediately got thinking about the brain regions involved in language as well as the causes of language disorders. Non-fluent aphasics have difficulty producing speech, but over-learned and over-used expressions, like responses to "How are you?" (e.g. "Not bad, and you?") continue to come out automatically. I thought that this must mean that these phrases are stored in a particular region of the brain, apart from majority of language and vocabulary. I found it particularly interesting that very usual responses as simple as "yes" or "no" were often difficult to produce. These responses often come out just as automatically as "Not bad and you?", so why are these shorter, simpler answers so much more difficult to produce? The trigger, "How are you?", must play a role in this. The trigger for "yes" can vastly vary, so maybe it is the combination of trigger + response that is stored in a different place - maybe within our long term memory. If this is true, could it mean that increasing our long-term memory, or at least increasing the number of automatic phrases contained within our long-term memory, could be helpful in protecting against some effects of aphasia? Although this would not eliminate aphasia altogether, it may provide someone with non-fluent aphasia with more resources to use for communication purposes even before any recovery from therapy is noticed. My younger cousin would always respond to "I love you" with "moon and back" (translation: to the moon and back..). Maybe a regular saying like that could be saved in the brain of an aphasic and could bring loved ones great comfort in such difficult times. Maybe we should all be using regular, telegraphic, phrases to communicate, especially to communicate the most important things? Just kidding... but maybe it would be helpful for future aphasics!

Additionally, I was astounded to realize that even global aphasics, who have very poor comprehension and can often only speak one word (if any), maintain relatively good understanding of intonation and social cues of language. They even use these aspects alone, using extremely minimal words, to communicate. Is it possible that pragmatic aspects of language are, too, stored in a different area of the brain? Maybe learning to focus and relying more on these cues on a regular basis could help prevent the most drastic of measures from occurring after a brain injury, and even facilitate therapy afterwards by giving one something to use as a base on which to build upon.

April 3, 2011
Prepare to have your mind blown (if you haven't already heard what I am going to tell you). In one of my other classes, Behavioral Neuroscience, we are currently learning about sleep. Our professor informed us that dolphins are able to make half of their brain go to sleep while the other half stays awake and allows them to function. Although their mode of communication may not necessarily be language, I still think it's amazing that they are able to function with only half of their brain being conscious. It made me wonder if they can speak and communicate efficiently when this is happening? Seeing as how we learned that language is (mostly) lateralized to one hemisphere of our brains, if we had the ability of sleeping with half of our brain, would we lose the function of speech when/if that language-dominant half were asleep? My guess would be no, not altogether ("sleep talking" would probably explain things). However, would we be able to control what we think and/or thus say? When I thought about these factors, I was even more completely amazed that dolphins can still function with half their brains. This must mean that their core functions are spread throughout their entire brains to allow them the ability to continue to control their actions with only half their brain; I would assume their brains are not lateralized as in humans. Thus, could it be that the hemispheric lateralization of our brain functions concentrates our abilities (e.g. language) so that they can be optimized and more specialized? In other words, is it because of our lateralization that we are able to use such a complex thing as language to communicate and function at a higher level? Although we do not have the ability to "sleep" one side of our brain at a time, I am happy to have language and realize it may not be possible for us to "sleep" our brains because of it. I think it's a worthwhile sacrifice, though.

April 10, 2011
Debate 5, which occurred on April 6, 2011, was about the integration of minority languages versus the dominant language of society into schools for early school-aged children (ages 4-12). I found the arguments to be quite similar to the debate I was involved in, Debate 1, concerning the introduction of Ebonics as the language of instruction where it is dominant in the Oakland, CA School Board. In both of these debates, there was a lot of emphasis on language being a part of culture, but how much of culture really depends on language? Of course it plays some kind of role in cultural identification, especially when it comes to minority languages as language alone can associate one with a small yet recognizable community, but this question continued to make me think. I read a book for another class ("Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles", by Richard Dowden) and it was heavily focused on the diverse cultural values of the people in Africa. In one chapter on Senegal, it was noted that when the French controlled the country throughout the colonial era, a great majority of the country began to speak French. However, it was also noted that the indigenous people continued to be very committed to their Muslim culture and values and felt no connection and often rejected the French culture and values. In this case, the language they spoke helped them to survive and get by in a French-speaking majority society, but the Muslim culture was definitely retained and even today remains quite unaffected. I think language can often be a little too tied to culture, especially with regards to minority languages, and to me this can be especially worrisome. Considering the "melting pot" that Canada is, there would be no way every minority language could be accommodated in the school system in every prevalent community. I do not believe that learning a majority language in school takes away ones culture; culture can most definitely be observed in the home. Making minority languages the languages of instruction often seems to be an attempt to "save" a culture, but maybe we should be looking at other ways to do so (i.e. speaking the language at home can maintain it's use among children, if that is the parents wish). Learning English and becoming bilingual can only better a child's future, and it seems to be common knowledge now that it is easier to learn a new language at a young age. So why are we depriving some children of this opportunity? Bilingualism or instruction of English in school should never "strip" a person, family or community of it's culture. In addition to the Dowden example, there was an example brought up in class of Gaelic in Cape Breton. In the highlands, Gaelic is offered as a language course. Although I am not from the highlands and do not know Gaelic, I still feel hugely connected to the Scottish culture that is so prevalent in Cape Breton. Don't get me wrong, I think the total extinction of these languages is a major shame, but if I was spoken to in Gaelic in school and at home, starting at a young age, I feel I would be at a disadvantage in society. Mastery of the majority language is, more often than not, crucial to reaching your highest potential. English is such a universal language today that it can often be huge tool in surviving and thriving just about anywhere in the world. Thus, I have a hard time seeing more good than bad in the integration of minority languages in school systems, especially for early school-aged children.

Thanks for an awesome semester and I hope you have an amazing summer!