User:Keegancolville

Keegan Colville

I am an undergraduate student at Dalhousie university currently in my third year of a BSC majoring in psychology. My interest in psycholinguistics is to gain an understanding of the formation of language and speech. Further I would like to increase my understanding of human interaction that comes from our use of language.

January 17th, 2011

The first full week of this class has been a great introduction to psycholinguistics. I think that starting with Whorf's hypothesis was an excellent spot to start the class because it portrays the complex relationship between language and thought. The idea that our language determines, in however large or small a role, how we think about the world around us not only a great way to introduce the importance of psycholinguistics but it also sparked great interest in the subject matter. As the week went on, our discussion of the chimps that where taught a language and their increased cognitive activity that occurred afterward was an interesting display of the importance of language in our ability to complete high level activities.

Overall this first week has been a great start to my study of psycholinguistics. The subject matter has been interesting so far and I am excited to further the discussions about how language makes us think the way we do.

January 24th, 2011 After this week my ideas of what constitutes a language has changed. Our Friday lecture that discussed phonology and phonemes surprised me after learning that ASL (American Sign Language) is consider a language under the same classification as english, french or any other spoken language. The idea that language comes from its minimal unit of sounds (or in ASL movement) is one that I had never thought of. The second concept that I found very interesting about this week was the ERP measurements during the reading or listening of sentences. The idea that our mind works a lot less when what were are presented in normal and of frequent occurrence is an interesting concept that leads to two questions: does this mean that there is greatly increased brain activity when learning a new language because non of what you would see would be regular? and is this the reason that we are often fooled by those t-shirts that have words spelled wrong on them (i.e "thnik" rather than think)?

January 30th, 2011 The perception and articulation of words has been the most interesting thing for me this week. After this week I have been constantly picking apart what I am saying to see if the letters are behaving in the way that you would typically think they should or if they are making a completely different sound. The greatest example of this comes from 'ghoti', which can be pronounced as fish because of how the words are used. Overall before this week I understood that the simple rule that says one letter makes a certain sound was not true, however I have become much more aware of it in my everyday speech now and find it very interesting that this idea can almost be ignored as we learn language.

Another this that I found interesting this week was the voice recognition technology, or better yet the lack there of. I knew that it was not the best but did not realize how much work still need to be done in that field to help improve the technology. Further I hope that the intelligence agencies that are rumored to constantly monitor phone calls have much better voice technology to do so. I feel bad for anyone who got arrested for saying that they were going to "take Tom to the airport".

February 6th, 2011 A short week this week but a couple of interesting points came up during. The lecture on morphology has once again changed my ideas of American Sign Language (ASL). This is due to the idea that ASL has morphemes in the language as all other languages do. This has once again opened my eyes to understanding ASL as a language with all the defining characteristics, similar to how the phoneme lecture did. Another interested idea came from the book readings on word recognition. The top down and contextual ideas of how we process and understand words in an interesting concept in general. One of my favorite ideas here is that words cannot really be understood through their morphology alone but instead gain meaning through the association they have with the words they are with.

February 13th, 2011 This last week has been one dominated by personal work on my chapter page. From that I have become intently interested in the amount of power that emotion has in our expression and understanding of language. Primarily I am impressed with two things. First the power that emotional cues, both unspoken and spoken, have in determining the meaning of a statement. Secondly the power that emotionally relevant information has in increasing memory of the information. This second idea has been very interesting to me because it explains and age old question that I have had about myself. That is, why am I able easily able to remember a comic's jokes better than I was able to remember what I was told by a teacher about Shakespeare? The answer seems to be the emotional connection that came from those jokes compared to my teachers class.

On the aspect of class material this week I would have to say that my favorite aspect of this week is the lexical access. Mostly the extreme power that it brings up about our complex brains. The mere fact that we are able to store this vast amount of knowledge on word meaning and be able to access it so quickly can only be in one way, amazing.

February 27th, 2011 The last week of class (the one before the break) was dedicated mainly to sentence processing. A major section of interest in this topic is the concept of garden path sentences. Further I have been trying to understand the relationship between garden path sentences and the speed reading abilities of people. As we learning in class and through the readings this week, garden path sentences cause the reader have elevated levels of brain activity due to the unusual pattern of words that they are encountering. From this I wondering two things about speed readers (which I do not have the ability to do, but have friends that can). First I wondering if they have the ability to speed read through garden path sentences or will their techniques cause them to take longer on this type of sentences. I say this because I would assume that skimming a sentence, a common technique of speed readers, would cause confusion in extracting a sentences meaning and possibly causing them to have to read a sentence multiple times while a non-speed reader could read it only once.

My second wonder is about the level of brain activity that a speed reader has. I would assume that speed reading in general would cause a high level of brain activity and that coupled with the increase of reading a garden path sentence may cause even greater levels of activity. On the other hand perhaps this is another reason why garden path sentences are not easy for people who can speed read.

March 6th, 2011 This week I have been interest in the lexical bias effect. More so I have been interested in the idea of whether or not this effect suggests a top-down aspect to how we read and produce language. The top-down operation in word production from the lexical bias effect seems evident in the fact that speech errors occur more frequently in the Baars et al. experiments when switching the first letters of the words would make sense and make real words rather than non-words. This suggests a top-down because the brain is recognizing that the words are real or not before the speech is being produced. I would like to further clarify my thoughts by saying that I believe speech production in general is a top-down process. However, in this case it is more a matter of reading that appears to be a top-down process, which seems interesting because one would think that the brain would need to first take in the information and then produce the correct words. However it seems that here the brain is just taking a logical pattern and producing the word that seems that it should come next unless that word is not real.

One last interesting note is that this topic does seem to refer back to my thoughts last week about speed reading. The abilities and strategies of speed readers appear to be based off of a top-down process during reading.

March 13th, 2011 The Lectures of the last week have made me more concussion in the my speech but more so in my writing. I during our lecture on writing I noticed several things that my writing was missing that I hope to incorporate in to my reports in the future. I major aspect of thing is the idea of knowledge restructuring rather than mere telling. This relates to the concept of stepping back and making the different connection between information which I believe that my writing at times lacks.

Another interesting aspect of this week was the concept that writing requires a greater amount of cognitive thought than speech does. I find this slightly hard to believe and wonder how it is measured. I would agree that typically speaking is an easier process than writing is because of all the added syntactic and semantic forethought that is required compared to general everyday speaking between friends. However, when considering the difficultly of speeches and the required thought that goes into them I find it hard to believe that speech in this sense does not require the same or greater amount of cognitive activity than writing. The only thing that would make sense to me here is that this is not pure speech production. Many people write speeches before saying them and therefore use their writing skills to produce to words that they will say. In the end I guess I am wondering where the two acts combine and are considered the same.

March 21st, 2011 The main concept that I got from this week's lectures on language development is the power of children. I find it impressive that even during the time in utero we can hear and recognize voices, as seen by babies that prefer to hear their mothers voice. Further our general ability to pick up language over the first few years of our life and turn crying and cooing into the language we use today is amazing. However, the most impressive aspect of children in language development might be due to their ability to very easily communicate with one another, without inhibition for social situations, and at times build a language within their own groups. This is best seen by the Nicaraguan children who created their own sign language when they were thought to have no communal language at all. Also this concept of child created languages can be seen by the development of syntax in pidgins languages that turn them into creoles.

A question arises when considering the power of children in the development of language. That is, how is it possible for children to cause such great development to a language when they do not fully understand it themselves? This relates to the idea of critical periods in the development of language. How is it that children can add syntax to a primitive language that they have heard during their young life but are unable to learn language when they have heard nothing through their childhood years? My best understanding of this concept is that a little goes a long way. That is to say that any communication causes much greater understanding and development than none at all.

March 28th, 2011 The highlight of this week was the aphasia guest lecture that we had on Friday. This lecture not only gave a lot of great information on the speech disorder of aphasia but it also opened my eyes up to a few other problems. First was the prevalence of aphasia. I had no idea that it was such a wide spread disorder that effected around 10,000 people per year. This is a fairly high number in my mind and one that I did not expect because I had truly not heard out it outside of my classes in psychology. However, as the lecture continued I was told why aphasia is not as well known. This is because people with aphasia do not have a voice to speech out with about their disorder. Where as people with other disorders, such as Parkinson's that was talked about as being much less prevalent but much more known of, have a voice to speech out and show others the suffering that they are going through. This is a sad and true fact and made we wondering how many people are suffering in silent pain such as those with aphasia.

April 4th, 2011 This last week marked the start of the debates. While they have all been done fairly well so far, one of the most interesting things that I have learned from them is to watch where my information comes from. This is best shown in the second set of debates on the FastForward program. Even though both teams showed a fair amount of research the against team, arguing that the FastForward program was not the best therapy for dyslexia rehabilitation, did a great job of showing that the research provided by the pro team was bias. This is because all the research the pro team had was done by the company who created the program. This was an eye-opener that showed me to not only be concerned about what a research paper is saying but also to be careful that the research is being done by a reputable and, as seen primarily in this case, an un-bias group.

I look forward to another great week of debates and to get mine done on Wednesday.

April 10th, 2011 The last week of class finished off the last three debates. While my team unfortunately did not win our debate, it still went pretty well. Further, the debates in general this week were of the similar quality of the debates from the week before, this being good.

I enjoyed psycholinguistics over the course of this term and have learned a lot from it. While studying for other exams, as I am now, I find myself having a great knowledge of anything that is related to this class. I thought the projects of this class were a great way to get us all involved in our learning and hope other classes that I take in the future share this similar outlook on work.