Days 7 and 8

Wednesday was super uneventful, I really just took the day to continue to read Jackendoff’s book (as referenced in my day 4 post, if you’re interested!).

Today, however, I had my second meeting with Professor Terry in Chapel Hill. We talked a lot about how the mystery of language acquisition is central to the study of linguistics. No matter what specialty you take in the field, the question of how children learn their first language so easily informs linguists of all types. For example, researching or helping people with language deficiencies (as a speech language pathologist would) exposes what structures we use to define “normal” language. Additionally, I talked to Professor Terry about what his typical workday is like and learned that professors do a lot more than teach, especially at a research institution like UNC.

This program has been a really great way for me to start to get my foot in the door of linguistics. While the beginning of the summer is a logistically challenging time of the year for professors, making my placement a little untraditional, I really learned a lot over the last two weeks and I made some important contacts that will be able to help me continue to inquire about the field through my senior year and my college decision process. Language is a beautiful, uniquely human quality that I can’t wait to continue to learn about as I further my studies.

linguistics / lɪŋˈgwɪs tɪks /

Day 6

Today I met with Erin Chesson again, this time at Awaze Ethiopian restaurant in Cary! In her field studies work at UNC, Erin has been documenting a language from Eritrea, which is a country that boarders Ethiopia and thus has a fair amount of cultural and linguistic overlap. We shared a sampler plate of meat and vegetarian dishes, served in traditional Ethiopian fashion on top of Injera bread. You eat it by pinching the food between a piece of that bread, no utensils required. If you’ve never had Ethiopian, you should definitely check out Awaze— it’s delicious (and only 6 minutes from CA)!Over lunch, Erin walked me through the IPA (discussed in previous post) in more detail, explaining the positions of the tongue that make each sound, as well as showing me which sounds are common in English and which don’t exist in English hardly at all. As we are both interested in language acquisition, we exchanged stories of watching our young nieces and nephews learn to speak and comparing experiences studying abroad and visiting France.

I really enjoyed getting to know Erin, and I’m sure she will continue to be a valuable resource for me as I continue to look into linguistics. I might even get a chance to sit in on her section of Linguistics 101 this coming fall!

Our meal! (peep the IPA charts in the background)

Day 5

Today I had the opportunity to do some independent research about the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). When I met with Ms. Chesson last week, she recommended that I look into how this system works in advance of our next meeting tomorrow because it is an important foundation to work in linguistics.

Essentially, the IPA is a standardized system of classifying all of the sounds in spoken language. Based primarily on the Latin alphabet, this system has distinct symbols to represent every sound possible on all languages on earth. You’ve probably seen the IPA if you’ve ever looked in a dictionary (or even on dictionary.com) and it can be a super helpful tool when studying non-phonetic languages like English. English does not have a 1:1 ratio of symbols and sounds; letters like c or th represent multiple, distinct sounds, as in cat and cycle, or the and math. The IPA distinguishes between these discrepancies to make pronunciation easier. It features two charts, one for consonants and one for vowels, organized by the location of a person’s tongue and lips when they make the sounds.

Since its creation in 1886, the IPA has been updated several times (most recently in 2005) to account for all sounds, including Clicks and Ejectives, and be able to represent every language on the planet, not just European ones. This system is really cool and understanding it is a very important step in studying linguistics.

IPA Chart of Consonants

Here’s a link so you can hear the sounds in this chart for yourself 🙂

Day 4

Today was a casual day for me! I didn’t have any meetings, so I had the chance to hang up my hammock and start reading the book Dr. Terry lent to me, Patterns in the Mind: Language in Human Nature. I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read so far; this book is a great introduction to the fundamental arguments made in modern linguistics: the Argument for Mental Grammar, the Argument for Innate Knowledge, and the Argument for the Construction of Experience.

Up until the 1950s, American psychologists followed a “behaviorist” view of the way the mind worked, positing that babies come into the world knowing almost nothing and grow to learn from surrounding environments and behaviors. In the late 1950s, a linguist from MIT named Noam Chomsky published work that asserted that the behaviorists’ argument was simplistic and the human language behavior can only be explained through complex principles in the speaker’s mind. Chomsky effectively revolutionized the field of linguistics, allowing us to think of the mind as a sort of complex, biological computer and breathing life into the study of the mind in all disciplines.

If my lovely blog posts have sparked a burgeoning interest in language for you, I’d definitely recommend picking up this book– it seems like a really good place to start. Looking forward to another week of discovery come Monday!!

Day 3!

Today I took the hike to UNC-Chapel Hill to meet with linguistics professor Dr. Michael Terry. After parking off of Franklin St and successfully navigating my way to the Smith Building (truly a feat for someone as directionally challenged as I am), Dr. Terry and I sat down to talk about our respective interests in linguistics. Dr. Terry was a mechanical engineering graduate student when he took his first linguistics course, which sparked a new interest which led to his pursuing his Ph.D. It’s really cool to hear from people who arrived at their linguistic curiosity in ways much different than I did.

A specific field within linguistics that I am interested in is language acquisition, both of a first language and foreign ones. While this is not Dr. Terry’s concentration (he works primarily with semantics), he had some really interesting insight for me into how this process really works. Dr. Terry explained to me that in any language, sounds are grouped into mental categories that often fly unnoticed for native speakers. For example, the p sound in “Paul” and “stop” are actually two distinct sounds, but English speakers categorize them together making them nearly indistinguishable from one another. However, these same two sounds are completely and identifiably separate for Hindi speakers, just as how p and b are totally different sounds for English speakers. This is why its often difficult to drop an accent when learning a foreign language; the acquisition of a second language requires you to identify and reclassify sounds that are not intuitively different. However, despite the distinction between these two sounds being lost on adult speakers, babies as old as 8 months have been seen in studies to be able to identify the distinction between the sounds before they are verbal, opening up more questions about how much of language is genetic or learned.

Dr. Terry also introduced me to one of his ongoing research projects about the impact of dialect differences between Standard Classroom English (SCE) and African American English (AAE) on 2nd graders in testing. The specific syntactical difference tested was the marking of the third person singular, i.e. she bakes. The addition of that –s at the end of the verb is present in SCE but not in AAE, and this small letter has a surprisingly significant impact on AAE-speaking children. In fact, when Dr. Terry and his team designed math word problems that conformed to the descriptive grammar of AAE, students performed up to 10% better– a whole letter grade. This finding leads to bigger questions about misdiagnosing attention issues or math deficiencies in young students due to a factor that is completely unrelated to their ability to do math. This research was a really cool example of the scientific aspect of linguistics that makes it particularly interesting to me.

Dr. Terry lent me his copy of Patterns in the Mind by Ray Jackendoff (one of the first linguistics books he read), which I am really looking forward to reading before I meet with him again next week. Go Heels, Go Linguistics!

The Smith Building– Home to Linguistics at UNC!

A poster describing Dr.Terry’s experiment made for a conference

Day 2

Today was a much more eventful day for me! This morning, I met Erin Chesson, a linguistics graduate student at UNC, at Starbucks in North Hills to chat about her work. She worked for Americore in Durham assisting Eritrean refugees in adapting to American life. In that line of work, she found herself doing the work of a linguist, so she decided to go back to school to learn the technicalities of the field that she did not get in her undergraduate degree of Global Development Studies from UVA. For her graduate thesis, she is planning to study the development of Tigrinya (the primary Eritrean language) in Heritage speakers (children of local refugees learning and increasingly speaking English).

This summer, Erin is teaching a section of Linguistics 101 online. For our meeting today, she printed out the first lesson from her class to give me a crash course in basic linguistic terms, including Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar and Language Competence and Performance. Prescriptive Grammar is a set of statements for a given language that assert what a speaker should or should not do (i.e. Don’t use the passive voice, Don’t use double negatives, Don’t split infinitives). Grammar has a different meaning for linguists, referring to rules a speaker uses on all levels: word-level, sound-level, sentence-level. While these rules are obeyed in part by speakers, they are almost never a complete reflection of how language is used. A linguist’s goal is to describe actual language use, which is where Descriptive Grammar comes into play. Linguistic competence is a speaker’s ability to identify whether or not a word or sentence is plausible within their language’s grammar. For example, some clusters of letters look like they could be an invented word, while others look like jumbles of nothing, and how some sentences identifiably make sense, while others are completely unclear. (I’ve included some English examples at the bottom of this post– see if you can test your competence!) While competence refers to a speaker’s knowledge of their language, performance refers to their ability to use it– both in typical and atypical settings, such as stutters or swearing or mid-sentence abandonment.

While I could go on and on about the new things I learned today, I think the aforementioned aspects are the most important to understand for the casual linguistics enthusiast. Next week, I will be getting Ethiopian food with Erin to further discuss her research!

Here are some excerpts from a Linguistics 101 textbook– test your competency in English!

Day 1

Today was the first day of my very non-traditional work experience. Rather than going into an office today, I had a relatively unstructured day of reading that I imagine would not be unheard of for an academic, especially a professor of linguistics. Today, I focused on Language in Immigrant America by Dominika Baran, a sociolinguistics professor at Duke. After picking my copy up from the CA library (thank you, Dr.Mc), I spent most of the day at home reading it.

In her book, Dr. Baran analyzes the ever-adapting connection between language and the immigrant experience in America. When she was 15, Dr. Baran immigrated from Poland, and her interest in language, rhetoric, and culture surrounding immigrants from all countries stems from her personal experience. At the time of her immigration in 1987, Eastern European immigrants faced a lot of discrimination and slurs in America, a trend that has since shifted away from this group towards Latin Americans and Middle Easterners in recent years. This book’s content is very interesting, but it is certainly not Linguistics 101, as the language and terminology used is very advanced. Definitely a rewarding challenge for me, as I intend to read as much of this book as I can during the days of the program that will be similar to today for me structure-wise. I also will be attempting to contact Dr. Baran in coming days to ask detailed questions about her work so I can better understand her research.

Author: laurac541