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.