The project I am working on in the Psychology
Oscar Department is based on linguistics. Linguistics is applied in the
spontaneous English files, which is the name of my first project that I am
working on. In the spontaneous English files, I had to mark a boundary on
syllables that were in the words that were spoken and state when the person
spoke and when they were silent. The point of this project was to see how
people differ in speech based on their native languages. Everyone had said the
same lines, which made it easier to mark the syllables that were spoken and
compare the rates that people spoke. I had worked on this project under my
supervisor, Professor Tuuli Morrill and two graduate students named Zhiyan Gao
and SungShim Choi. There was also another undergraduate student that worked
with me named, Astacia Pegram.
On a weekly basis, I went to the Speech Analysis
Lab or worked on my computer at home to work on the spontaneous English files
because the computers had to have Praat (a software) downloaded on them for the
spontaneous English files. One thing I discovered this week with the
spontaneous English files was that people have different rates of speaking. The
English spontaneous files depicted how people vary in the way they say the same
words and they also vary in the amount of time it takes them to say the same
things. Some people say things slowly while others speak a bit faster.
My
position in the Psychology Oscar Department relates to my long-term goals by
allowing me to apply linguistics in the real world. I was always interested in
Psychology and linguistics and I am glad I got a chance to do activities to
apply them in projects. My major is Biology but I am always open to all the
sciences because they seem interesting and I get to learn new things from them.
