User:Midas~enwikiversity

Midas is a fourth year Psychology student at Dalhousie University.

Jan 17 2011

The first thing I learned about language is that it is not just a set of symbols and/or words, it has to be productive and generative. That made sense to me because a language would not make sense unless it had a set of words, meanings and rules to facilitate efficient communication between sender and receiver of the language. The way Kanzi the bonobo chimp leaned certain aspects of language reminded me of young children's first acquisition because it is demanding in nature. A fact that I found interesting is that language development seems to be independent of technological development, which could be seen as evidence to something innate about language. I also found interesting the idea that language might dictate the way we think. This raises the question that perhaps people with different languages think differently? How about bilingual people, or people with more than two languages? Would they have a broader scope of thinking? A counter argument could be that you can have a feeling/thought that you do not have a word for. So maybe different languages do not influence or dictate the way we think after all. Our discussion on brain localization of functions started with talking about Franz Joseph Gall's Phrenology. Although science does not support this study anymore, I cannot help thinking that Gall's contribution might have raised the question "is there a localization of brain function?". Later we examined all the different types of brain imaging. Using these technologies we found a lot of evidence for localization of function but also that it is not as simple as that because the pathways and connections between brain parts are as important as the parts themselves. Although the brain works as a whole, there is also specific parts that seem to be mainly responsible for specific things, example Broca's area and speech production.

Jan 24 2011

At the beginning of this week we talked about how language tends to be lateralized to the left hemisphere while the actual acoustic analysis of speech is bilateral. After that we discussed different aspect of language like prosody, organization... etc. I found interesting that Chomsky argued for an innate language acquisition mechanism which reminded me of the fact that we earlier learned that language development is independent of technological advancement. Which I thought could be evidence to support Chomsky's argument. We also talked about neuroplasticity in young people and that the critical period for language acquisition is when we are young. I benefited from the next class a lot because I found our discussion of ways to do research very useful, not only for this class but other classes as well. I learned a very useful tool for referencing on papers such as Mendeley and Refworks. On the next class, we started by talking about the ratio between letters in a language and the sounds. Even thought a language could have a fewer letters than another, it could still have the same sounds because a letter could signify a sound consisting of a consonant and a vowel, which equals two letters. What I found interesting was the fact that human sign language can be as rich as acoustic languages. It is amazing how humans find it necessarily to communicate even if they cannot produce and/or hear sounds by other people. So perhaps it is not language or language acquisition that is innate, but the need to communicate is what is innate in humans. Language is an important characteristic that separates humans from animals. Humans are able to communicate their ideas and thoughts to other individuals. They also record it in many ways such as books and the internet for others to see. When people receive this knowledge, they build on it which facilitates further advancement because they did not have to start from scratch (because of the knowledge passed on by their predecessors). Perhaps if animals could use language they would be competing with humans over the world. Or maybe I need some rest because I am starting to not make sense...

Jan 31 2011

We started the week by an introduction of Acoustic Phonetics where we talked about speech recognition. After we examined an example of speech recognition software we came to an appreciation of the amazing job our brains do. Our brains are able to lump phones into phonemes and process speech effortlessly. On the other hand, we have to program computers, sometimes to a certain person’s voice or a limited vocabulary, and still make more errors than human beings. This reminds me of the example of someone calling your name at a party, and how you are able to respond even if there is a lot of background noise and you are having a conversation with someone else. Even using today’s technology, the computer’s accuracy in doing such a task is questionable. We also learned the importance of context and humans’ ability to somewhat anticipate what a person could say next. Again, a computer would probably fail at doing this while human beings do this unconsciously. When we talked about context I could not help thinking about how a person’s bias could influence what he hears/mishears or things like conditioning and learning. Later, we talked about the function phonotactic constraints serve for word recognition. We also talked about how the brain functions to segment auditory data into words we can understand and even fills in the gaps in words so we can hear them intact. Additionally, we examined the relationship between information we get from the moving of the lips and actual auditory information. In the last class of the week we broke down the process of learning to read into different parts. We also talked about Phonological and Orthographic awareness across different language speakers and IQs. After that we examined different processes and models of word recognition and reading.

Feb 7 2011

Unfortunately, we only had one class this week because of the weather and Munroe day. However, on the day that we did have class (Monday), we introduced morphology and morphological typology. We also discussed some evidence for rule versus association based understanding. Morphology is a sub level of linguistic analysis that examines morphemes, words, affixes... etc. By looking at cross-linguistic examples we can see that there is a lot of recursivity, which suggests that perhaps we have rules we use to interpret the meaning of words. Stanners and Sonnenstuhl provide evidence for rule based recognition while Rumelhart & McClelland and Joanisse & Seidenberg provided equally compelling evidence for associations. This leads me to think that this issue is similar to many phenomenons in psychology that if taken to one extreme do not provide a complete explanation (black vs. white -> maybe its grey!). Is it illogical to suggest that the two processes of rule application and association exist and function together? An example to support this would be the Finnish language where there could be 1000 verb forms! There has to be rules because people could not possible memorize such a big number of verb forms, however, evidence suggests that there is also a lot of memorization and association in the Finnish language.

Feb 14 2011

We started the week by talking about the concept of “word”. The first question we addressed is what a word means to us, not necessarily just the dictionary meaning, but the way it is pronounced, the placement in a sentence and the context in which it is used and how these assimilate in our minds. English is a good example of a language that has evolved over time. Some words can only be seen in old literature while some words are a product of today, like facebooked. Similarly, sign language seems to evolve to something that fits the norm if the community. When we were talking about how the same word could have different meanings depending on the context, the word “ass” was used to explain this notion. It could have several meanings like donkey or the Gluteus maximus muscle. We discussed how the context could influence what meaning we get from hearing the word. I also could not help thinking that the person that says the word could also influence what meaning we take. For example if we hear a nice elderly lady saying look at that “ass” we would probably think that she is referring to a donkey she saw somewhere as opposed the body part (or would we?). This is similar to context or maybe considered a part of the context. It took me a few seconds to realise that the word “and” had no meaning when we were asked “what does and mean?” I have never thought about the meaning of and. It is a function serving word and does not really have a meaning. We continued our discussion of words the following class and we looked at models of lexicon that attempt to explain how and which meaning we access when we are given a certain word. I found the spread of activation model interesting because I felt it overlaps with the learning theory view of schema. We also looked at how different parts of the brain are activated in response to words and sentences. In the last class, we started our discussion about sentence processing. We watched a video about a computer that could play Jeopardy, Watson. One of the people in the video describes his feeling as going from impressed to blown away, I think I was blown away as soon as I realized that the competitor in the middle is a computer! Although the system still has bugs, it could help us in understanding syntax even if the way a computer would understand a sentence is different from humans. How would a computer respond to an insulting sentence for example? We associate emotions with certain word sequences that may make us happy or angry. Will the computer reach a perfect language ability that it can feel emotions? Or maybe emotions don’t tie into language so neatly. We also talked about grammar as a system to form a sentence but does is not the same as meaning because and grammatically correct sentence could have no meaning. In the end, we discussed Chomsky’s universal grammar rules.

Feb 26 2011

We started the week by continuing our discussion of sentence processing, in specific, parsing. We looked at different models that try to explain how we break ambiguous sentences into phrases that we can understand. One model that I found particularly interesting is the Garden Path sentences model. The few seconds it takes us to figure out the meaning of the sentences are fun, but also gives us insight on how the brain seems to commit to certain parses that it finds difficult to get out of. However the faster reading times for the non-minimal sentences provide an argument against the Garden Path model. It would be interesting to see studies that try and integrate the models and the neuroimaging techniques that our modern day technology enables us to use. The next class we talked about brain areas associated with syntactic structure processing. These types of lectures tend to make me a little anxious because of my modest neuroscience background; however I found the way the research was presented to the class very efficient and easily understood. I found interesting the evidence that suggests that parsing in the brain comes before meaning which supports the Garden Path model we talked about last class. There seems to be evidence for the Garden Path model but I also some challenges, so maybe the model is not completely off track but is just incomplete? In the last class we talked a little in the beginning about the exercises for out chapters, and then we started talking about discourse which is essentially connecting the sentences in a meaningful way. Can we think of discourse as the process which integrates parsing and meaning making? What I found amazing was our ability (or maybe looked at as a shortcoming?) to infer information that was not stated in a story or sentence as in the example of the guy that visited Mario’s with his third wife. I believe that people somewhat tend to hear what they want or expect to hear. Like when someone mishears you and the word they he/she hears is something you were talking about earlier or that he/she expects you to say.

Mar 7 2011

In the first class we talked about the similarities and differences between language and music. When we were discussing the idea that if you had as much practice with music as you did language, you would be as good, a counter arguments came up that the uses of language are different from music. So, it would not have the same amount of use anyway. Wouldn’t Chomsky argue that this is not possible for language at all? Since we only have a language acquisition mechanism and not a music one? Maybe people with a musical talent have a “music acquisition mechanism”, is this what we call the musical ear? In the next class we talked about speech production and we examined reaction time differences between words and pictures. Wouldn’t it be interesting to examine perhaps if the word’s pronunciation difficulty influences or biases our errors?

Mar 14 2011

In the first class of the week we continued our discussion of speech production. A phenomenon that I found dazzling is the tip of the tongue phenomenon. I couldn't help thinking that what causes it is perhaps that other information about the an image is better recalled by the brain than the word for that image? Testing this would probably not be very easy as it would be time consuming (wait for the person to forget the word), and it could also be hard to measure if the participant actually forgot the word. Personal differences in memory have to also be taken into account. We also talked about – "What do you need to speak?" which is one of the things I believe I will probably still remember long after we have complete the course. As promised, the lecture about gesture did make me "super aware of gestures", which I am not sure is such a good thing. I thought that if gestures are so important, that perhaps the the origin of language is gestures? Is that why we still use gestures or do they serve a purpose? Perhaps they help the speaker or the audience visualize the ideas expressed which was one of the suggestions in class. When the volunteer from class came up to describe her favorite part of the cartoon we saw, I noticed how she used gestures especially in situations where she might have been trying to invoke a memory by a visual representation of something we just saw. Do people use more gestures when explaining things that the audience has seen or has experienced before? In any case, the use of gestures, in a way, supports the argument that visual information might be easier processed or remembered by the brain as in the tip of the tongue phenomenon.

Mar 20 2011

This week we talked about language development. We discussed the “critical period” hypothesis for language development and the famous case Genie as a case that supports this notion. There might be an over simplification going on if we blame it all on the “critical period” because we did not take into consideration how the social isolation and perhaps any other form of abuse that Genie had could have affected her language development, then again, when they tried to integrate her back into society she did not develop language fully as other children did. So does a critical period for language development exist? There is evidence for it, but I feel uneasy to attribute all of Genie’s normal language development problems to the critical period. In the next class we continued talking about language development and I thought it would be interesting to see if there is research done that compares differences in language acquisition for babies born to parents that speak different languages. What I am trying to say is that I think it would be interesting to see if there are any hereditary differences in the way babies of different races, for example, acquire language. One could argue that there is probably no difference because babies can discriminate between words in another languages (like Hindi to English born parents) that their parents cannot. We know we inherit many things such as the way we look from our parents, but are there more in terms of language? If not, then why did the different cultures of the world develop different languages?

Mar 28 2011

In the first two lectures, we talked about bilingualism, and while that is important, I will be talking more about the last lecture. In the last lecture we had a guest speaker talk about Aphasia. Her lecture raised a few questions for me. We talked about how some disorders have spokespeople who go around and educate people about the disorder for a number of reasons. The speaker hypothesized that since Aphasia is a communication disorder, it doesn’t have advocates who suffer from it to talk about it. She also stressed the importance of getting a lot of therapy soon after the stroke that caused the Aphasia to occur. She explained that the most “gains” she sees in her program is in people who start therapy sooner. I find this point strange because the lesion is supposed to heal making is easier to regain speech. How could the person that just suffered this lesion have more gains than a person that had time to heal and then was given therapy, or is it a completely different mechanism at work here? Aside from me finding this disorder sad, I wonder what the ethical issues for people who deal with Aphasia patients. Who makes the decisions for them (since they cannot communicate their needs/wants)? Also, if we follow a localizationist model and we know that therapy does help individuals regain at least part of their speech, is it the same area that is retrained or does a different part of the brain take on this new function (neuroplasticity)?

Apr 11 2011

To be honest at the beginning I was a little scared of this course but I appreciated that the instructor was very clear about what he expected from us in all the coursework. I think giving more weight to the blog entries and less to the learning exercise would be a good idea since the blog entries take much more effort combined than the learning exercise. Also, it encourages better attendance. I like to think of them as a different type of assignment. Also, since the blog entries are in a way the only method of accessing the student's understanding and attention in the actual lectures (more than the chapter and the other assignments at least), I feel they should be given more weight. Overall, this course was a great experience. What I liked most is that it has no tests but all the coursework is designed to get the students to think critically about the material and not just memorize it and answer some multiple choice questions. I wish I was able to attend the last week of debates because I am sure they were all great but unfortunately I was sick.