Final Post

I can't believe this quarter is already almost over! This has been by far my most engaging and interesting class of this quarter, and I'm very sad to see it over already. It has definitely made an impact on my life, however. I never would have thought that the study of linguistics would make me a more perceptive person, but it certainly has. In just 10 short weeks, I've already become much more sensitive to accent differences as well as lexical ones. I am never bothered by a misunderstanding anymore, instead, I find myself intrigued and thinking about how that person's vowels are shifted in comparison to what I'm used to. At Stanford, I've come to enjoy listening to the international students in my dorm, like Ben from London and Oliver from Bermuda, because I can always relate it back to this class. It's so fun to be able to take something I never used to think about, accents, and apply all the new knowledge from this class to them.
One thing I've noticed about Stanford that really stands out is how quickly my vocabulary and way of speaking has adapted. In just one quarter, I've already found myself talking in the same manner as the rest of the people in my dorm, and I can see some of my speech mannerisms displayed in them as well. I catch myself saying that things are "mad cool" like the guys from Boston and Brooklyn upstairs, and hear others using the NorCal "hella" that I often find myself using. The entire dorm has picked up on the word "twisted" from the guy from Malibu and "sick" from the kids from Colorado.
Another thing I've noticed that I never would have before taking this class is how quickly people can adapt to the accents of others. I always used to assume that the person with the accent was simply losing their accents when I began to understand them better, but after taking this class, I really think that it is the listener that adapts to the accent. The fact that we have so many international students and professors on campus illustrates this phenomenon. My friend Anne has a statistics professor from Africa. The first day, she called her mom after class and said she was going to fail because she couldn't understand a word he said in lecture. As time has gone on, however, she has adjusted to his accent, and now she can understand him just find. I had a similar experience with my chemistry professor, who is Chinese. At the beginning of the quarter, the whole class was worried because he was very difficult to understand. Now, however, I find myself hardly noticing his accent at all.
This class has really changed my outlook on speech in general, and I hope I can take more linguistics classes in the future. I really enjoyed having the small class atmosphere and getting to know everyone else in the class. I would like to say thank you to Meghan, the class was so fun and interesting because of the topics we discussed and the readings we had. All of them were relevant and interesting and I never felt like we were just doing busywork like I have in other classes in the past. Also, the final project was actually really enjoyable and I can't wait to share my results with everyone later!

Language Comprehension

We were asked this same question in the first week of class and I said that i thought that vocabulary was the mot important feature in language comprehension. I still agree with that, although I now have a much better grasp of why that is. Originally, it just seemed intuitive to me that vocabulary differences would be more difficult to overcome than sound and syntax differences. Now after learning about language perception for the past quarter, I know that what I suspected is true. The human brain is an extremely complex and amazing thing. Even with people of completely different, thick accents, I am able to understand their English with only minimal difficulty. The difficulty is much more insurmountable when it comes to vocabulary differences, however. When someone does not share the same vocabulary as you, it is nearly impossible to know what they mean. Even when speaking with non-native speakers of English that have different syntax structure than I am used to, after conversing with the for some amount of time, I am able to understand them very well.
The idea that the most important feature in language comprehension is vocabulary has been backed up on numerous occasions by experiences I've had in my dorm. My friend down the hall is from Bermuda, and his English has many vocabulary differences from mine. On numerous occasions, I've had trouble understanding what he was talking about because I had never been exposed to the vocabulary that he was using.
We were learning last week and the week before about how people's perceptual systems adapt to understand even those people with the most extreme accent differences. This is why I think that vocabulary is the most important feature. Even if it is difficult to understand someone with an accent at first, chances are that it will get easier with time. With vocabulary, however, there is no adjusting. You either know the words or you don't.

Lexical Differences

I've always thought that the different words that people have for the same things are very interesting. They do make it very difficult to have a conversation at times, though. I think that lexical differences have much more of an impact on a conversation than phoenetic differences. When people don't have the same words for things, here is no way that they will be able to understand what the other means. On the other hand, I think that if only the accents that are different, people are able to adjust to the accent and still understand each other for the most part.
Some lexical differences that I've encountered recently are mainly with people that live in different English-speaking countries. I have a friend down the hall from me from Bermuda, and we've already encountered many lexical differeces in our English. Just today, he walked into our room and looked at my roommate's desk and said "Wow, could you have any more stationary?" My roommate and I were so confused because both of us pictured personalized letters and envelopes as stationary, but when he said it, he meant all of her pens and pencils in her drawer.
My dad's side of the family is from Oregon, and there, they say pop instead of soda. I understand the difference now and it's not a big deal, but when I was much younger, I remember being so confused every time my aunt asked me if I wanted some pop. My mom had to explain that by pop, my aunt meant soda, although I'm sure I was still wary of what I supposed was a new kind of drink.
Lexical differences can lead to a lot of confusion in everyday conversation. I think that the differences are really interesting, though, and usually a conversation with my friend from Bermuda ends with him teaching me a new word for something and us laughing about how different our English can seem and how funny it was that neither of us would have thought to use the other's word choice.

Dialect Perception Experiment

I was pleasantly surprised that this journal was very readable and user-friendly. Even a person with no background at all in linguistics would most likely understand almost all of it, with the exception of the IPA symbols. I found that to be important because linguistics research is not something you hear about on a day-to-day basis, so the fact that it was so readable would make it easier for people to become more familiar with that line of research.

I thought that the experiment was very well thought out. I felt like as I was reading, as soon as I thought of an objection to improve the experiment, it was addressed by the authors. For example, just as I was thinking that it would be important to know which other region the mobile people had lived in, those other regions were named.

Something that they did address to an extent but that I think would be important to do if one wanted to improve the experiment would be to narrow down the experiences of the mobile listeners. The age at which they lived in the other region is extremely important. If they lived there as toddlers versus as teenagers, it would have a huge impact on the way they themselves talk as well as perceive others. In addition, it is important to know how long they lived in that other region. Also, I personally feel like having lived in only one other state doesn't really make them completely mobile. I felt like even with two state's worth of experience wouldn't really make them more perceptive to all other dialects.

In addition, the West is much to broad of a category in my opinion. They made it a point that they differentiated between Mid-Atlantic and New England dialects in this experiment, and yet they have this huge, broad category of West. As a native Californian, I know that there are many different dialects in the West. In fact, my project is going to be centered around differences between Northern and Southern California. That's two different dialects within one state, while they try to wrap up that and many more states and call them all one dialectical category, which I really don't think works.

Finally, I'm sure that the speakers in the experiment all had very different voices which may have had an impact on the results. Gender, race, and age surely had an effect on the way the speakers were perceived, and I don't think those differences were taken into account. In my project, I'm going to be making sure the two speakers I use have similar voice pitches, which is something that could have been useful in this experiment. That way, they would know that the any differences the listeners perceived were based on the dialects and not on voice pitch or quality.

Evaluating Formants

To me, this activity was one of the most interesting things we have done so far. I love studying acoustics and actually did projects on the acoustics of instruments, especially the piano, for two different classes last year. I find the similarities between the piano and our vocal chords so interesting. I had a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what we were supposed to do and how to view the formants in pratt, but I think I figured it out. I recorded myself saying "heed, hid, head, had, hod, hawed, hood, and who'd" like the author in the reading we did. Then when I went to plot the data, I selected view formant list, and then it gave me the values of the first five formants for that vowel. The only thing I wasn't sure about when measuring the formant values was what part of the formant I was supposed to pick. Some of them sloped either up or down, so I wasn't always sure exactly what point I was supposed to evaluate it at. The values that I got did seem to line up well with most of the values in Figure 8.5 in the text, though, which I think is a good sign. Wen I plotted the points on the blank graph in the text, I put the F1 frequency on the vertical axis and the difference between F1 and F2 on the horizontal axis because that's what the author did on his graph in figure 8.7. My graph looks very similar to his with the exception of the vowels for the words hood and who'd. For those two, my F2 value was much larger, and thus the difference between F1 and F2 is much larger. I love learning about acoustics, I think the way that sound is generated into speech is amazing and I can't wait to start learning about it in class tomorrow!

Linguistic Profiling Quiz

I thought that the quiz was really interesting. After the first one, I thought that it was going to be really easy because I knew right away that the first speaker was African American. When I got to the third speaker, however, I was shocked at how hard it was. The third speaker and the first speaker were both black, but their accents were so different! The first had the accent that I am used to, with the more pronounced near open/near front vowel sounds in words like went and Mary. The third speaker was much more difficult for me to categorize because he had much more of a Caribbean accent, which is not something I'm used to. The second speaker was a caucasian male, and he was actually kind of difficult for me to; I had to listen to it a few times. I think it's because he had a bit of an accent that I'm not really used to, so I wasn't sure whether it was a white man with an accent from somewhere else in the country or someone of a different ethnicity. The fourth and fifth speakers were also hard for me to guess, I couldn't really hear their accents, but I was immediately able to guess that the sixth speaker was latino. When he said the "o" sound in snow and go, it had more of a "u" sound in it as well which really stood out to me. The seventh and tenth speakers were very easy for me to pinpoint because I recognized the middle eastern and indian accents. The eighth speaker was also pretty obviously a black man. He did some of what I said earlier about having the near open/near front vowel more prominent in words like went and Mary, but he also seemed to cut off the ends of some of his words which, for me at least, tipped me off. In some ways I thought that the accents would be much easier to figure out than they were. I was very surprised at how much trouble I had with some of them, but to me that just goes to show how used to many accents I've become, that they don't even really sound that different to me anymore.

"The Butter Spilled on the Cot" analysis

The first time I recorded myself, I spoke in the way that I would say "The Butter Spilled on the Cot" in an everyday situation. The second time, I accented u in butter and the o in cot. I tried to make both of them sound more like the a in Alex. The differences in the spectogram are very interesting. For the word butter, both times there was an apparent stop in the middle of the word at the "tt". When I said it naturally, the amplitudes of the first and second syllables were very similar. When I implemented the accent and tried to make the u sound more like the a in Alex, the amplitude of the first syllable was much larger than that of the second. The rest of the spectogram of when I spoke naturally has pretty steady amplitudes, rising and falling numerous times throughout the rest of the sentence. On the spectogram of me speaking with the accent, though, there is a very low amplitude until I get to the word cot, where it suddenly peaks again and the lines become much larger and closer together.

Class on 9/29/08 and IPA

Last Monday was a very interesting class. It was funny to see how the quiz got such wrong results in some cases. I agree that the quiz should have had a few additions made to the questions so that the accents could have been pinpointed correctly. Reading the articles was so interesting! I've never heard the Appalachian English accent, so it was really cool reading about the words that sound so different from the way I would pronounce them. Reading the other articles on my own was a good experience too because I got to see how people talked about accents and dialects in a much more informal way. They didn't have the fancy lingo that some other sites use to explain accents which made it much clearer to me.

Learning about the IPA was so interesting too! I thought it was really cool how all of our names were put up on the board in IPA, it was a really creative and fun way to introduce us to the alphabet. While I pretty much understand how the alphabet works, I know that there's no way I'm comfortable enough with it yet to use it on any level. The symbols and terminology are all so foreign to me, but I'm sure it will get easier with time. It was funny when we were all trying to make all of the sounds; some of them are so difficult!

Most Important Feature In Language

I think that the most important feature in language comprehension is vocabulary. The way that the brain works allows people to adjust very quickly do the different sounds that distinguish different accents. In addition, while sytax is important to achieve optimal clarity, I feel like it's relatively simple to understand what a person means even if the sentence seems slightly scrambled. Vocabulary, however, is a make or break type feature for language comprehension. If a person doesn't know local lingo or the vocabulary of the language or region, there is no way that they're going to be able to understand what is being said.

What American Accent do You Have Quiz

My result from taking the test is that I am from the West, which is correct since I'm from California, not too far from Stanford. Taking the test was really interesting because for some of the words they asked me about, I'd never even considered the fact that some people said them different ways. It was really interesting because the majority of the words they asked about sounded exactly the same to me. It would be really fun to compare the way I say those words with the way someone from say, the South, would say them now that they have been brought to my attention. I also thought that taking the test was a funny experience because on almost every question I had to think about it pretty seriously and say the words out loud in order to decide. It's interesting that I'd really never noticed the way I, or anyone else for that matter, really says the words. I've just always passively spoken and understood them being said.