Week 9 Update

Hey guys. Sorry that this post is late. I was on the East Coast visiting some colleges and to be honest I completely forgot about it. Also I am now writing this on my phone on the plane so this may not be my highest quality post either. Anyways, during the precious little time last week that I was in town and could work on my project, I actually figured out some pretty interesting things. I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to tell you guys because I don't know how much I'm supposed to save for my presentation. Are my conclusions supposed to be a surprise? Maybe I'll just tell you guys what analysis I did but not what I'm concluding from it. I'm almost done with my analysis, which is really good because this project is almost over. Yay.

Ok, so my goal for this project has evolved a lot from my original proposal, but what I hoped to learn from it has stayed the same. I always wanted to gain some insight into Quince's speech patterns, and that's what I did, so that's pretty cool (with a lot of help from Dr. Ingram). At some point, I was trying to compare Quince and Reilley, but I think for my presentation I'm just going to focus on Quince because 1. I have more data available for Quince, such as pronunciations and contextual information, and 2. it's really hard to compare them because they're both at very different cognitive stages that is kind of reflected in their language but not completely. Quince is a lot older, and has a lot more words he attempts, but Reilley's words are more functional and stuff.

I looked at two specific aspects of Quince's language acquisition: vocabulary development (in both his expressive and receptive language) and speech development (in only his expressive language. For vocabulary development, I looked at how many words he had, and which semantic categories they were in FOR EACH CATEGORY. This is where the whole comprehension versus production (receptive versus expressive) thing comes into play. So basically, I was seeing how the words Quince could say differed from the words he could understand but not say.

For speech development, I examined Quince's pronunciation, so I obviously was only looking at which words he could produce. I looked at whole word complexity, using the PMLU scores, and I also analyzed his phonetic inventory of consonants and his phonetic inventory of vowels. This is where the really interesting stuff was, and the stuff that I'm saving for the presentation. But in general, when you analyze a phonetic inventory, you're looking at what speech sounds the subject can produce.

So anyways, this last week I was mostly doing my phonetic inventory analysis (this is also where Dr. Ingram had to help me a lot because you have to be able to recognize patterns in speech samples really well, so basically you have to have a lot of experience and I have little to none) and polishing up the rest of my stuff too. Sorry again that it's so late.