Year in Review

Ohio State is referred to in casual parlance with various invocations of its size. When I first toured the university, the tour guide adamantly stressed the myriad ways to make the university feel small. As a double major in linguistics and psychology, I have a built-in experience of both ends of the size spectrum at Ohio State. On Wednesdays and Fridays last semester, I went from a nine-person linguistics seminar (the professor said it was twice as large as usual) to a 70-person psychology lecture. Learning to move fluidly between these two spheres has been the foundation of my experience at OSU.

Not long into my first year, it became apparent to me that the kind of work I was drawn towards required a PhD. I began to aggressively narrow my focus within linguistics. My original interest was in second language acquisition. Most of what I’ve pursued in college has been in pursuit of this overarching goal. While I’ve worked to deepen my knowledge, I’ve also tried to broaden my reach as well, drawing as much into my orbit as possible. I soon decided to add a double major in psychology. I took Psych 1100H as a GE, but I was struck by the applicability of psychology and cognitive science to the linguistics work I wanted. I realized as well that linguistics’ strong behavioral focus missed the biological half of the puzzle of language-I wanted the cognitive component as well.

Given my goals, I was particularly drawn to getting involved in research as early as possible. During my second semester, I landed a research assistant position correcting machine errors in a forced alignment algorithm of text and speech. This has given me valuable experience with the types of skills necessary to conduct phonetic research. I have since taken up the original research project I began in the aforementioned linguistics research seminar and am developing it into my thesis project.

While I have been very focused on academics and the future since coming to college, I am perennially helpless to prevent other interests from cropping up. I’ve always been a fan of Shakespeare, and accordingly I visited an exhibit of early printings of Shakespeare’s (mostly) complete works. In addition to reading one book on the topic, I became fascinated by the English 17th century printing industry and the development of spelling in vernacular print works (the only other widespread written language, Latin, had the benefit of a writing system tailored to its sound inventory). This interest paved the way to a Medieval and Renaissance studies minor and given me a broader global perspective.

I am also poised to eventually step into leadership and service positions in clubs and at my church. I want to especially work with first years, providing them with a resource but also a friend in their transition to college. I was personally found the task of making friends and connections a daunting one, and I want to alleviate that for others. I would also like to work with English as a second language students. The work I hope to accomplish on the second language phonetic acquisition is useless if it is not applied in the classroom. Having the field experience to understand the needs of second language learners is an integral part of designing effective teaching methodologies. If I want to provide input on that from a cognitive and linguistic perspective, I would like to be able to consider all the factors.

Ohio State’s size is an asset, not a curse. Maintaining the benefits of the size while offering the advantages of tight-knit communities is a balance OSU tries to strike. I have tried to do a similar thing within my own college experience-going broad and diving deep to the extent that I can.

G.O.A.L.S.

GOALS Statement

Global Awareness is very important to me because it affects so much of daily life in the modern world. To expand my global awareness, I would like to do a Global May program. There is one for linguistics in New Zealand that I am particularly interested in..

 

Original Inquiry

I would like to conduct research in second language acquisition and the effectiveness of language teaching methodologies. I am interested in exactly how the brain learns and retains language, and how different methodologies affect the brain’s efficiency in this process.

 

Academic Enrichment

I am looking forward to taking more GEs and hopefully finding some new interests. I have really enjoyed my Microeconomics GE this semester. I am also hoping to take some graduate level-courses in linguistics as an upperclassman.

 

Leadership Development

I was a club leader in high school, and I hope to take part in club leadership again. Leadership is really valuable because it gives an experience that taught me so much in such a short time. I hope to expand on these experiences.

 

Service Engagement

I would like to work in ESL classrooms and bring the benefit of second language acquisition research to learners. I want to use service to break down barriers that hold people back from success.

Career

[“Career” is where you can collect information about your experiences and skills that will apply to your future career.  Like your resume, this is information that will evolve over time and should be continually updated.   For more information, go to: http://honors-scholars.osu.edu/e-portfolio. Delete these instructions and add your own post.]

Artifacts

 

This is an assignment from my Ling 2000H class called “See Your Speech.” The linguistics department at OSU uses See Your Speech to gather data from underclassmen. For this assignment, we recorded ourselves speaking a series of words. The system uses the data to generate a vowel chart, which shows the approximate position of the tongue for each sound. We then compared our data to the average chart for our classmates. We analyzed the formant values, which are the frequency values that reveal the position of the tongue. I was very proud of this assignment because it was my first official linguistic analysis.

See Your Speech Analysis

My vowel chart was generated by “See Your Speech” after completing six sets of pronunciation recordings. This vowel distribution was then compared with the average chart for the women in my Ling 2000H class. All the vowels are graphed based on their formant values, which gives the vowel chart much like it would appear in an IPA chart.

My vowels are distributed a little haphazardly for the first formant. I would expect BEET and BOOT to be the lowest values, followed by BIT. I expected the middle vowels to be BET, BOAT, BOUGHT, and BAIT. The highest formant values would be BOT and BAT. This is basically how the average chart looks, except BAIT is lower than BIT. BOT also has a lower formant value than expected because it is often merged with BOUGHT.

For my chart, BOUGHT is higher than BOOT. The highest average formant values, for BOT and BAT are in the middle of my chart, and BET and BAIT are nearer to the bottom, indicating that they have a higher formant value. BOUGHT, BOT, and BAT are all higher on the chart. This means they have a lower F1 value and were produced with a higher tongue than the average. BET and BAIT were lower on the chart, indicating a higher F1 value and a lower tongue. BOUGHT, BOT, and BAT are the biggest outliers, with over 350 Hz difference in the averages (BOUGHT has a 600 Hz difference between my chart and the average). These are the lowest vowels in American English, and that may have contributed to their variation.

The F2 values are a little more like the average. BIT and BOOT are the only outliers. BIT has a formant value approximately 1200 Hz beneath the average value. BOOT is about 300 Hz above the average. Other than those two outliers, the formant values tend to fall along front/back lines. The front values have a higher F2 than the back values. In back vowels, the tongue is farther back, leaving more space in the front of the mouth, and a longer tube. This creates a lower formant value. In front vowels, the tongue is farther forward, and restricts the space the air flows through, increasing the formant value.

My first observation about my vowel chart is that the vowels tend to lie on a line opposite of what the average was. The vowel in BEET does not appear on my chart at all, which was a little strange. Because of BEET missing, it was hard to analyze the high vowels, because there was only one remaining. I could not really make a generalization for all the high vowels based on only one vowel.

My chart also did not have as large of a range, particularly in the high values for the formants. This means that my throat is more elongated than the average, and that I have a deeper voice than average. My highest F1 was 650 Hz, the highest average was 900 Hz. My highest F2 was 2000 Hz, the average highest was 2450 Hz.

One of the potential reasons for the differences in my pronunciation is my hometown. I am from Cincinnati, which is known for having some different pronunciations than the surrounding area. Although these differences are more pronounced with older people, my grandparents and their siblings have lived on the west side of Cincinnati for most, if not all, of their lives and display thicker “Cincinnati accents.” The west side of Cincinnati is very insular. Many residents have lived in the same neighborhoods for three or more generations. Pronunciation differences are exacerbated by the tight-knit community that doesn’t see a lot of movement in or out.

My vowels were more like the average in F2 than in F1, but both were different than the average. Overall the large differences between vowel charts speaks to the enormous variety of pronunciations observable in English observable within one classroom.

About Me

I am Rachel Meyer, from Cincinnati, Ohio, and I am an honors student at the Ohio State University. I am majoring in linguistics. I am interested in second language acquisition and historical linguistics and am excited to learn about and research these topics. I did some service work with immigrants in English as a Second Language classes. Second language acquisition is another fascinating topic, and I believe the research in this area can change the way we teach and learn languages. This can have a huge impact on immigrants’ learning experiences with English. Many of our ideas about language pedagogy are based on old ideas about language structures in the brain. Although we have the technology to better understand the neurological processes behind second language learning, teaching philosophies have not changed in over 50 years.  The lack of progress in this field has negatively affected my own language learning experiences, but it particularly hurts immigrants. Lack of access to adequate language instruction can prevent immigrants from developing the necessary skills to find well-paying jobs and support their families in their new homes. I would like to be involved with second language acquisition research and develop efficient teaching methods to make fluency in another language an accessible goal for immigrants, students, and casual language learners.