Week 7 Update

This week, I got my first very rough look at some results, which is cool. I looked at the average PMLU scores for Quince’s produced speech, Quince’s comprehended speech, Reilley’s produced speech, and Reilley’s comprehended speech. Weirdly enough, all of these numbers were within about 0.2 of each other (with standard deviations of around 2.5), so right now it’s not looking good for the whole complexity-decides-which-words-kids-say hypothesis. But that’s ok, because 1. Dr. Ingram was explaining to me that we have a lot of work to do on the analysis of this part to fix it by eliminating outliers and stuff and 2. I have two other hypotheses to test before I have to start getting worried.  Also, this might maybe help me prepare for the AP Statistics mock that I’ll be taking soon. That should be interesting.

Some more stuff I’ve been doing at ASU involves typing out the IPA transcription of every single one of Quince’s produced words, fixing all the errors I’ve been finding in my spreadsheets, and performing more analysis on my data with semantic categories.

The transcriptions took forever since I had to prompt Quince to say the word into my phone so I could record it, listen to his pronunciation a ton of times, figure out the sounds that make up his pronunciation, translate those sounds to IPA, type them using this IPA symbol thing, and copy the final transcription into my spreadsheet. Even though this whole process was pretty tedious, it was definitely worth it. I always knew Quince had a limited range of sounds, but I never really realized that he essentially only has ONE vowel. His consonants are actually not even close to as restricted as his vowels are. For each word, he puts a consonant in front of, behind, or sandwiched between the ə sound, which is pronounced like the u in up, and then puts these consonant-vowel units together in different combinations. Dr. Ingram mentioned that vowel problems are very common in apraxia, so this definitely makes sense for Quince’s diagnosis. And the most exciting thing is that I don’t think anyone realized just how limited Quince’s vowels are, so if we focus on getting more vowel sounds in his speech therapy, we can hopefully improve his comprehensibility significantly.

Most of the errors I’ve been fixing in the spreadsheets have to do with excel auto-filling cells with things I typed in the first time, like replacing the word butter with butterfly because I wasn’t paying attention and had entered butterfly in an earlier cell. I also somehow managed to switch the produced and comprehended columns of words in some but not all of the spreadsheets, so I had to go through and check that all of those were in the right spot.

For the semantic analysis, I looked at a textbook that Dr. Ingram gave me (and also is the author of, so that’s cool). I broke my word lists into five categories: specific nominal, general nominal, action words, modifiers, and personal-social. I can go into more detail if anyone wants, but basically the most important things to know are that general nominals are most nouns and personal-socials are the words we use to relate to different states and social expressions like hi, bye, or thank you. There are two general kinds of kids, expressive and referential. Expressive kids tend to have a vocabulary that has a higher percentage of personal-social words than receptive kids, who tend to have more general nomials in their category.  We aren’t exactly sure why this is. Maybe it has something to do with personality, like more outgoing people using more personal-socials, or upbringing, if a child’s parents try to name everything they see to expand their child’s vocabulary or something. Anyways, I looked at my sample of Quince’s and Reilley’s vocabularies and calculated the proportions of each category in them. Right now, it looks like both Quince and Reilley fall somewhere in the middle of these two categories, but after Dr. Ingram helps me account for all the error and stuff this could easily change.