User:Megan J Mac Donald

Megan J Mac Donald
I am currently a fourth year Psychology student at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. I am originally from Port Hood located on Cape Breton Island, NS and once I graduate this spring I plan to apply to Occupational Therapy and Health Administration.

Blog Post #1- January 12th, 2011
I feel almost embarrassed to say that besides Psycholinguistics there have been only a handful of other courses I have taken in university that have asked me to contribute original or opinionated thought. Although I know there is no one to blame, that larger class sizes make more economical sense, which ultimately means multiple choice tests and standard assignments, somewhere amidst hundreds of students I have lost my own thoughts. However this Psycholinguistics course not only takes the student’s opinions into account, but also adds educational value to the world through the use of Wikiversity. The past couple of classes, in particular last class, have brought about some hard questions about language and thought, but sometimes we must ask questions for which there is no real or concrete answer in order to aspire individuals to look at these questions in a different way. Two specific questions:is language central to human-ness and is language central to thought? reminded me of Alex the Parrot who I had met before in a previous Animal Behaviour class, who unlike Kanzi the Chimp was an animal that had the ability to vocalize. Alex the Parrot could identify 50 different objects and recognize quantities up to six; seven colors, five concepts and had a vocabulary of over 150 words. But what set Alex apart was that he had an understanding of what he was saying, understood the turn-taking of communication and the syntax used in language. For Alex an apple was called a "banerry" which was thought to be a combination of "banana" and "cherry," two fruits that he was already familiar with. He could also recognize English phonemes and could identify sounds made by two-letter combinations such as "SH" and "OR." However there are many researchers invested in the idea that language is the one thing that makes human beings unique and the last boundary standing between man and animal, which is perhaps what made Alex the Parrot so controversial. So one must ask is animal language as complex or expressive as human language? From where we stand and from what we have seen from various animals, humans seem to have the more expressive “language” and perhaps an animal such as Alex is not necessarily using "language" but instead a two-way communications code?

Alex the Parrot YouTube Video []

Blog Post #2- January 23rd, 2011
Until the 1960`s language lateralization observations were based on patients with brain lesions of varying severity, location and etiology which left room for skeptics to argue that language fuction might not be lateralized in the brain. Although modern research has since confirmed the linguistic specialization of the left hemisphere of the brain in major language functions, with the right hemisphere still having language capacity but to a more modest degree, how researchers have come to this conclusion may in part be owed to these various skeptics. Since our previous lecture this past week on the importance of analyzing and thinking critically about scientific literature, I began to appreciate the contributions that skeptics have made to research. Even though sometimes their conclusions or suspicions may be wrong, it is this skepticism that leads researchers to take a second look at their research and to make sure every direction has been considered. Makes you wonder whether misguided or faulty research provides just as much as to reseach as literature that has been validated? Also while I was searching for articles on language lateralization one peaked my interest given my preoccupation with clinical and abnormal psychology, which claimed that decreased language lateralization is characteristic of psychosis and that it may be related to auditory verbal hallucinations. They found that compared with healthy control subjects and non-psychotic sujects with auditory verbal hallucinations, language lateralization was significantly reduced for the patient group (psychotic group). However, because they did not find decreased language lateralization in non-psychotic subjects with auditory verbal hallucinations in comparison to healthy control subjects, even though those with psychosis did have decreased language lateralization, a direct relationship between auditory verbal hallucinations and decreased language lateralization cannot be made. This again brings about the importance of critically analyzing scientific literature no matter if significant conclusions are found in one part of the research and not in another area.

Blog Post #3- January 30th, 2011
Although technology has given us advances to make our lives more convenient, with every advantage comes a disadvantage. Voice or speech recognition technology has allowed human voice to be transcripted, but only at 80% accuracy whereas humans can recognize speech at 96% to 98% accuarcy. We are still far from any sort of universal speech recognition, yet operator jobs are now being replaced by a computer with voice recognizing technology. As recently as 1970, more than half of employed U.S adults worked in two occupational categories : blue-collar jobs and clerical jobs, which supported much of the middle and lower class of society but now many of the clerical jobs are being replaced by technology. However, what puzzles me the most is why speech recognition techology is replacing jobs when the technology still seems so inefficient. Take for example the voice search app on smartphones that requires individuals to repeat a command numerous times when they could simply reach down and click once. Or an operator that could quickly click a column on the computer and input a correct address, instead of weeks later individuals realizing their package isn't coming because the speech recognition software typed in 12 Down St instead of 12 Town St. Is technology really advancing our world or just producing more headaches? Another topic that grabbed my attention this week in class was the stages of learning to read. We are required at such a young age to learn one of the fundamental ingredients for furthering our education as young adults. If you consider all the complicated skills that a child is required to achieve at such a young age, it would be even harder to imagine what would be required of a child with a learning disability to achieve these same set of skills. Researchers have found that children with reading disabilities appear to acquire reading skills late in development, with children with reading disabilities at the age of 14 performing no better than normal readers at the age of 7. In particular, after talking about grapheme-to-phoneme issues for individuals who speech different languages than English, research by Backman and collegagues on children with learning disabilities stuck out to me. They found that children with reading disabilites were not as skilled at using grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules and had more difficulty with orthographic patterns that had multiple pronunciations. Perhaps if we can figure out how individuals of another language that have low grapheme-to-phoneme abilities learn how to speak English, maybe we can begin to understand how to help children suffering from reading disabilities with the same struggles? Long shot? Most likely, but just a thought.

Blog Post #4- February 6th, 2011
During the past week, as I near closer and closer to graduating from my undergrad, I have found myself considering the practical application of various topics I have talked about in my different classes. Although there was only one class this week, the one we did have covered the topic of typology. During the class it was also brought to my attention the amount of individuals in our class they speak more than one language or do not have English as their first language. At first I intially thought of the advantage they must have by being able to understand cross-linguistic similarities and differences. It seems that perhaps an essential part of any linguistics class is for a student to have encountered one or more exotic languages. Although some may argue this statement, having a background in subsequent languages would allow an individual to consider the universals that exist between various languages. However upon further contemplation and after reading a article by the National Research Council (U.S), it would seem that North American education has focused primarily on the needs of native English speaking students. and I am sure this is no different for any class offer at Dalhousie. Being that it is an English speaking university, one can't help but think of the amount of international students that attend our school and how difficult it must be to attend a school tailored to students who have a single native language. Perhaps research in typology, determing the similarites and differences across languages, can be used to be able to deliever a curriculum that is efficient for both English speaking students and those with a minority language. Even awareness may help professors and teachers to understand the different factors contributing to individual learning. However, we have to wonder if accommodating for those with English not being there first language will end up harming the education for the students whose first language is English?

Blog Post #5- February 13th, 2011
The proportion of older persons in society is continuing to increase especially as the baby boomers grow closer to retirement and so it is imperative that we gain more knowledge about the effects of aging on cognitive functioning. It has been found that semantic encoding and inferencing, word retrieval and new connection formation in memory all decline with age. But recently I came across an article that found significantly greater priming effect for older adults in comparison to younger adults. Research has proposed that the semantic network of older adults may be larger than that of young adults because older adults have processed language stimuli for at least two to three times longer than the younger group (Cameli, 1999; Laver et al., 1993). They also believe it may be due in part to an increase in the inhibition of unrelated targets. Although these findings do not seem logical being that most other cognitive functions deteriorate with age, the fact that semantic priming effects seem to increase with age may help us to understand some of the symptoms of Alzheimer`s disease better. It seems that patients with Alzheimer`s fail to produce priming under conditions which encourage automatic semantic processing. By understanding why older adults have enhanced semantic priming effects, perhaps this will give us an idea as to what occurs in the brain of an individual with Alzheimer`s if semantic priming seems to not exist. Another group of individuals that seem to have an increase in semantic priming effects is those with schizophrenia. Schizophrenic discourse is often characterized by associative intrusions in which strong associate to earlier words supplant contextually appropriate speech. Activated associations of normal individuals decay rapidly or are inhibited, which limits their potential for intrusion of activated association into their speech. These findings leads us to propose the question that if both older adults and schizophrenics have heightened semantic priming effects what is the difference in brain function that makes those with schizophrenia have inappropriate speech priming and older adults to avoid these intrusions in their speech?

Blog Post #6- February 27, 2011
Taking information from Wednesday and Friday's lectures I began to wonder whether factors besides working memory are involved in low and high reading span capacity such as inferences and elaborations mentioned in class on Friday. Upon further investigation I came across a number of studies that have found that individual differences in working memory are expected to be strongly related to predictive inferences. According to Gathercole (2001), the more activation available for meeting the storage demands of language processing, the more likely the reader will be able to draw inferences on-line during comprehension. Whitney and colleagues (1991) also found similar results but were interested in inferences that occured during the thinking-out-loud procedure. Although both the high memory span readers and the low memory span readers produced inferences, high memory span readers tended to do so toward the end of the passage, whereas low memory span readers tended to distribute their inferences more evenly throughout the passage. The difficulty in retaining so much information in the working memory led the low span readers to form concrete, specific inferences, some of which later turned out to be wrong. However, high span readers were able to make these decisions later in the passage, when they were more likely to be correct. It would also seem that low and high memory span readers differ in their memory encoding strategies: individuals with low span use mainly rehearsal, whereas individuals with high span use almost exclusively semantic elaboration. This indicates that the use of elborative strategies may enhance span performance but that not all individuals can use this strategy efficiently. Background information also influenes discourse comprehension, so when an individual encounters an unfamiliar passage, it is more difficult for them to draw appropriate inferences. So I guess the question may be, if we could control the amount of familiar passages or vocabulary of individuals or students would this help them to enhance their working span memory strategies and aid in inference and elboration?

Blog Post #7- March 6th, 2011
Before class this week I wasn't really aware that a condition existed in which people are not able to share in the enjoyment and production of music. Music is such a big part of my everyday life that I couldn't imagine not being able to appreciate or experience the positive effects of music. It made me wonder of the neural basis behind this disability and the brain differences between amusics and musically intact individuals. A study by Hyde and colleagues (2007) found that amusics had reduced white matter in the right inferior frontal gyrus and postulated that the decrease in white matter was indicative of an impoverished white matter communication in a right hemisphere-based network involving the inferior frontal cortex and the right auditory cortex. The decreased white matter in the right IGF of amusics was associated with an increase in gray matter. The correlation found between cortical thickness and the global musical scores at both the right IFG and right auditory area is consistent with the functional literature demonstrating that these regions are important in musical pitch processing. What I also found amazing was that individuals who suffer from aphasia or other brain damages can have their musical abilities spared. Basso and Capitani (1985) did research on the case study of a conductor that suddenly developed global aphasia, his musical capabilities were largely spared and he was still able to conduct. The case study provides evidence in favour of right hemisphere dominance for music. Another consideration that is often dicussed in the media is the positive theraputic effects of music on speech impairments and I often wonder if more psychologists should take into account music therapy when they are dealing with disorders or disabilities affecting linguistics. Is this something that should be taken more seriously in therapy settings?

Blog Post #8- March 13th, 2011
Out of all the aspects of language I found gestures to be the most interesting and prevalent due to the fact that it is one of the most well known parts of language that can be understood across cultures and throughout all languages. I came apon intriguing research that stated that children learn when their teacher's gestures and speech differ from each other. Often substantive information can be found in gestures that cannot be found anywhere else in the teacher's speech. However, although gestures in the classroom are apparent, the question is whether these gestures promote learning. A lot of literature has supported the use of gestures to aid in the learning and speech of an individual, but this study by Singer and Goldin-Meadow (2005) aims to understand how someone else's gestures can help other individuals to learn. Teachers usually gesture when they teach and those gestures do not always convey the same information as their speech. These gestures offer a second message for the students, particularly when the information conveyed in gesture does not always match the information conveyed in the speech it accompanies called a gesture-speech mismatch. Mismatching gesture and speech allows speakers to add a second problem-solving strategy to an instruction. Having a variety of problem solving approaches to a problem is postively associated with cognitive change and is usually beneficial for learners to be exposed to multiple learning strategies. Studies have found that in teaching across nations, Japanese students exposed to more alternative methods for solving math problems learn more than those students in America. So if other nations are finding such results shouldn't the same methods be applied to North American classrooms? It may also be important to consider the fact that gesture-speech mismatch could help students with learning disorders because they seem to need multiple, unique and individual learning strategies that usually differ from regular students.

Blog Post #9- March 20th, 2011
In class we talked about how an infant's first speech perception is in utero but that this does not effect their language acquisition later on in life, however there may be research still yet to come that would dispute this fact. According to an article by DeCasper and colleagues (1994), normal prenatal exposure to maternal speech influences the early development of speech perception is consistent with research showing that pregnant women's speech sounds are present in utero, that late-term fetuses possess relevant perceptual abilities, and that postnatal perception of speech sounds can be influenced by prenatal experience. In the experiment done by DeCasper et al., pregnant women receited a passage from a nursery rhyme throughtout the last 6 weeks of their pregnancy. After birth, the newborns participated in a choice task where they picked between the passage they had heard in utero and a control passage. The newborns picked the in utero passage significantly more than the control passage, and this research implies that fetal perception, and not just that of young infants, are affected by exposure to maternal speech. Another thought that came to mind during last week lectures had to do with Genie, who was neglected and was never able to develop language. After Dr. Newman mentioned the Nicaraguan Sign Language, I began to wonder if Genie had been locked away with another child, would they, like the Nicaraguan children, have come up with there own language or developed their own source of communication?

Blog Post #10- March 27th, 2011
Research has suggested that children who learn a second language are more creative and better at solving complex problems than those who do not. However, after the lectures this past week, I started to wonder about the impact of bilingualism on children, their overall language development, and whether learning a second language somehow interfers with verbal achievement or fluency? One study by Levy and colleagues (2007) found that after immersion in a foreign language, speakers often have difficulty retrieving native-language words, which is a phenomenon known as first-language attrition. They found that first-language attrition arises in part from the suppression of native-language phonology during second-language use, and thus is a case of phonological retrieval-induced forgetting. However, most literature supports the idea that bilingualism faciliates verbal and non-verbal fluency. A study by Bialystok et al. (2007) has also proposed the fact that bilingualism acts as a form of protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. The bilingual patients in their study exhibited a delay of 4.1 years in the onset of symptoms of dementia in comparison to monolinguals. One of the statistics that struck me most from this research was the fact that there are currently no pharmological interventions that have shown comparable effects such as these. This research shows that such cognitive-enhancing experiences like bilingualism affect both structural volume and functional organization of the central nervous system. Perhaps now as a society we had to need consider the benefits of bilingualism and whether immersion should become a standard in the school systems across the country?

Blog Post #11- April 3rd, 2011
I find while watching the debates it is hard not to have an opinion and often times you can't help but want to contribute arguments to one side or the other. I did have a few thoughts in response to some of the arguments brought up during the debates in the last week and think it is important to consider all information before choosing where you stand. In resposne to the Ebonics debate, I couldn't help but think of my high school in a small village on Cape Breton Island. Located throughout the village are street signs which are written in both English and the Gaelic language. The area in which I live had largely been settled by the Scottish, with the majority of the people from the town coming from Scottish decent, and with this some people of the older generation are able to speak Gaelic. Growing up, Gaelic was taken by all students in my elementary school, including myself, just as French was. Gaelic was also an option in my high school and there were quite a few students in my class who took the course. Gaelic in many areas of Nova Scotia is a dying language, and perhaps many individuals have not even heard of the language. However, it is important for a culture and has still been included as a choice in our schools. The same could possibly be done for Ebonics; we all know that English is the dominant language in most schools around here and understand the importance of teaching all students this language, but for those individuals in which Ebonics is a part of their culture could they not have the option to take this course in their high schools and elementary school? Perhaps this is a compromise that could be argeed upon. Often people get so caught up in the right or wrong of a situation, but sometimes the middle ground can be the answer to a problem. It is the same with the cochlear implant argument and whether we should teach these individuals either sign language or oral communication. Could we not use the benefits of both to help these children make the transition to one or the other. Sign language could be used as a stepping stone to help children who have received cochlear implants to better adjust to this dramatic change in their lifestyle. Sign language to me is more than a language, it is apart of a deaf culture and to make the decision to choose oral communication over sign language would be to take away apart of a child's culture and identity. Therefore I think that a compromise is needed to give these children the benefits of both worlds in order to better deal with their implants.

Blog Post #12- April 9th, 2011
Reflecting back on this semester, I turned out to enjoy this class a lot more than I thought I would. Initially I was intimidated by both the concept of Wikiversity and being evaluated in a different way than I was normally accustom to. However, this class challenged me to think in a different way but also gave me the opportunity to express my opinion, which rarely has happened during my time at Dal. I have actually never done a debate either in high school or university until now and have developed an appreciation of how difficult it is to back your arguments with evidence based research. The Wikiversity chapter, although time consuming at times, made me realize there is more to learning than simply reading out of a textbook and makes you look at information differently if you are the one that has to express your thoughts concisely and clearly. I also enjoyed the idea of blogging our thoughts on material brought up in class, however I did find it to be a bit much at times and maybe it would be better if blog posts were required every second week. I think I found the learning exercise to be the hardest part of this class, I like the concept of it but in reality it is much more difficult to come up with a learning exercise higher up on bloom's taxonomy, especially when we as students don't have experience with developing such activities or questions. Overall though, I got a lot out psycholinguistics and value what is being done with the class. These interactive ways of learning are important, effective and should be incooperated into more classes.