Final Post

Well, it is quite odd to think this is last time I will have the opportunity to read the blogs of my classmates.  Stanford has changed the way we all speak.  My hallmates and I are speaking more alike now at the end of first quarter than we did during NSO.  We all use "hella," "real talk," and "tight" frequently and without even noticing.  I never used any of these words or phrases before I came to Stanford.  I still get comments about the way I say "water" and my frequent use of "yoooo" instead of "oh no!"  I don't think my vowels have moved or formants shifted, but I do think being around the same people makes everyone start picking up some sayings from each other.  I've caught some of my roommates using some of my sayings without them even realizing that they were doing it, and I have done the same with their sayings.  It is inevitable and fun, I especially notice it now when I am back in New Jersey with old friends.  We all have really different phrases we say all the time, when just four months ago we shared all those phrases.  Friends going to school is Missouri have especially noticeable new terms that I cannot understand for the life of me.  This class has made me so much more aware of accents, lexicons, and the struggle people learning english as a second language are experiencing.  I would point out things to my roommates when we would meet someone new about their accent... they thought I was pretty cool.  It made me appreciate those accent differences so much more than had I not taken this class.

Language Comprehension, Again

I think all aspects are very important to language comprehension.  Without uniform syntax, vocabulary, and sound, it becomes extremely difficult to understand each other in conversation.  While I still do not believe that syntax is as important as the other two it would be wrong to completely ignore its helpfulness in understanding and being able to communicate.  If we structure a sentence incorrectly, it could mean the exact opposite of what was intended.  However, you can easily link together ideas without strict rules of sentence structure if you have a solid vocabulary.  Finally, sound is crucial to language comprehension.  While, we can compensate for accents and be able to understand them that is only to a certain extent and we do not always have the necessary time to accommodate to a different accent or pronunciation.    If a sound is completely different then you can only understand the conversation from the context of the sentence, and you can only do that if you understand the other words in the sentence (vocabulary) and how they are all related to each other by the sentence structure (syntax).  Therefore, all three are interrelated and if one is off the others help you  compensate for that deviation. 

Lexical Differences

Lexical differences are really fun to talk about because there are so many words that people use to say the same thing.  I think these differences make language comprehension much more difficult than any phonetic differences.  Mainly because without a mutual agreement on the definition of a word, people cannot communicate their point.  It is a less extreme version of an interaction between an American and a tourist who only speaks there native language, except with lexical differences we can easily explain what we meant.  This comparison was a stretch, but it still represents the same kind of confusion.  

My favorite lexical difference that new jersey has to offer is the terms benny and shoobie.  Though, benny is definitely more common and is used to describe the people who come to the jersey shore from north jersey or new york.  Generally, they are the hawaiian shirt, white socks and sandals tourist that come for the weekends causing bumper to bumper traffic for all shore residents.  And when agreeing to something, instead of saying "sure, I'll do that"  I say "shore, I'll do that."  That is mostly pronunciation, though.  Lexical differences came up in my Psychology 1 class.  We were discussing Whorfian hypothesis and how language limitations dictates certain attitudes and behaviors of that group.  The bigger the lexical differences, the bigger the attitude and culture difference is between groups.  It is an interesting theory, though it is not exactly accurate.  

Regional Dialect Perception

This paper and experiment made me think about other things besides residential history that could affect dialect perception.  For instance, does gender, race and/or age also affect people's regional dialect perception?  The paper briefly discussed age, but only in so much as to say that adults are better at distinguishing between different regions because of more travel experience.  This same experiment can be done only with the listeners being all female or male, of different races, and then at different ages.  With that information you would be able to compare it to the information gathered from the first study.  I also thought it was really interesting to see which listening groups believed they sounded more similar to which groups, even if they were from the same region and the only difference was whether they were mobile or non mobile.  I also thought it was counterintuitive that the number of stimulus repetitions did not have any effect on accuracy of dialect distinction.  

To comment on an old topic,  I was recently watching Mrs. Doubtfire  and was reminded of accent discrimination in the scene when Daniel (the father) calls impersonating different potential housekeepers.  Miranda would hang up the phone in particular when he pretended to have a very strong accent from another country, and say that the position is already filled ( just like in the article we read about discrimination).  

Wordlists and other fun!

The formant frequency  graph was fun to fill out.  It was nice to be able to see first hand my vowels and how formants work.   Also, I am feeling much more comfortable using Praat and reading spectrograms.  The reading was kind of difficult to get through and keep all the terminology straight, but definitely helps to be describe more accurately the spectrograms.  Class last week made me rethink all the times I have encountered someone with an accent to try to remember what my impression of them was.  I realized that because of their accent I would make assumptions about where they are from, and though I do not discriminate other people easily can.  It is very upsetting that people are not tolerate of accents because most people can think of a family member that has an accent.  However, it is funny how without any visual information people are very good at predicting ethnicity, but listening is also extremely visual.  The McGurk Effect is the obvious example of this and was really funny listening to it in class.  In my psychology class,  we are learning about how babies learn language, and intonation and visual stimulus are most important to language development.  I can recall many times when I would be unable to understand someone's accent unless I could see their face.  Also when I am listening to a second language, it makes it significantly easier to discern what is being said.  

Linguistic Profiling

I felt extremely guilty while taking this quiz after I had read those two articles about accent discrimination.  Some accents were immediately identifiable, while number 3 was incredibly hard to place and black was the last race I guessed.  However,  I could quickly pick out within the first few words if an accent was Hispanic.  I am assuming that this is because of I have a lot of family members with this accent so I can easily pick it out, similar to recognizing if someone was white.  It got trickier for me between number 1, 3 and 8 because though they were all black, but had extremely different accents (some more familiar to me than others).  But simply the fact that we can tell which race the speaker was by their accent alone informs us about our own stereotypes formed by being exposed to pop culture.  Another clue from the speaker was how they read the common phrase "Mary had a little lamb".  If you were born and raised in the US, you probably heard this nursery rhyme at least a million times whereas if you immigrated to the country this nursery rhyme is not as familiar and therefore read it in a more staccato fashion.  The quiz overall was pretty fun and my roommates enjoyed trying to race who could guess it correctly first.

Trying out accents on Praat!

I decided to try to speak in a southern dialect to be able to compare it to my accent.  The biggest difference between the two spectrograms is the length of time it took me to say each sentence.  I'm not sure if it is because my poor impersonation of a southern accent or just my intense concentration on the pronunciation of each sound naturally made me say the sentence more slowly.  

In my first, spectrogram with me speaking naturally a lot of the words seem to be merged together and more pronounced and dramatic.  Even the difference in the way I said the word "the" is significantly different in each spectrogram,  in the natural one it has a small amplitude, while in my southern accent it has a sharp high amplitude in the beginning and then returns to looking more similar to the natural way i say "the."

The two words with the largest differences are "butter" and "cot."  The way i said "butter" naturally put even emphasis on both syllables where as with my southern accent the second syllable did not have as great an amplitude and slowly returned back to the middle line.  "Cot" is also very different, but the only way i can describe the difference is the shape the waves have made.  In my natural sentence, "cot" looks like a diamond, but in my southern accent it looks more rectangular and overall has a greater amplitude for a longer duration.  

Hearing your voice played back to you is always a strange experience, but adding the horrible imitated southern accent made listening to my own voice even odder, though entertaining.

Regional Accent View

Class on Monday was really interesting.  I feel better about my quiz results now since I realize that maybe I don't have a very distinct accent that people would pick up on ( according to the quiz), but there is slang that sets New Jersey apart.  Because of the Mountain Speech article, I am really hoping to get to hear the Appalachian accent because I do not believe I ever have or ever really paid close attention.  "Fire" and "fair" being pronounced the same seems extremely foreign to me just like the word "flustrated" does, but I guess that is what makes this class interesting.  We are getting to learn about things so different than what I know despite being from the same country.  

IPA is an ingenious system that can account for all languages and just about every sound.  Our names in IPA was a fun way to be introduced to this new alphabet.  I definitely would need more practice with the IPA to be able to decipher it on my own.  I wonder how long this alphabet took to be developed and if it is constantly being changed and added to.  Also as language slowly changes over time, do the sounds we produce in a certain language also change?  And how long would it take for those changes to be added to the IPA?  

Language Comprehension

I believe vocabulary is most important to language comprehension by process of elimination of the three options.  Sound is not as important to language as one initially believes because sign language involves no sound and people are able to communicate just as effectively as spoken languages.  While sounds are helpful in communicating, they are not essential to getting your idea across as proved with sign language.  Syntax is also not necessary to comprehend a language or communicate.  Many ancient civilizations communicated through pictographs, which does not have strict structure or rules.  If a sentence's word order is mixed up, one would still likely be able to decipher what was meant and comprehend its meaning.  A lack of syntax does become more of a problem when one is trying to communicate more difficult ideas, however.  For these reasons, I believe that vocabulary is most important to understanding a language.  When children learn how to speak, they pick up single words and their meanings like "milk," "mama," and "toy."  Similiarly when one begins to learn a second language,  the first thing one learns is vocabulary through flashcards, for example.  The brain is able to "connect the dots" between words to understand the full idea, but without a knowledge of vocabulary there are no dots to connect.

Quiz Results

According to GoToQuiz, I have an accent from the West.  I find this extremely surprising, since I am from New Jersey and the Northeastern accent was the smallest percentage of my possible accents.  Even the Boston  and Midland accents came up before Northeastern, which leads me to believe that this quiz is flawed or I truly do not have a distinguishable accent.  I have lived my entire life in New Jersey so in an attempt to understand why I do not have a more distinct accent I took the How New Jersey are you? quiz.  The results of this quiz might explain why I do not have the accent most of my roommates thought I would when they found out I was from New Jersey, since I am only 69% New Jersey.  I suppose you must be 100% New Jersey to really have the New Joyzee accent.