Concepts and spoken language – 22 September

[Rebekka Puderbaugh]

Hi everyone,

I realized about halfway through my portion of the lecture that the recording wasn’t working, so I wanted to post here to reconstruct some of what we discussed. Please feel free to add your recollections of the lecture, and any insights or other thoughts you have on it.

I started with a question about learning to read. Some of you offered anecdotes from your own lives, reflecting on the experience:
One person remembered the experience of encountering a unknown word that she didn’t know how to pronounce: “cello” (which she initially thought was said with a [s] instead of a [tʃ] sound).
Another person remembered having trouble with the orientation of certain letter symbols, particularly R versus Я. She also remembered saying a word one way, then learning that the spelling didn’t align with the way she was saying it (Swedish “nu”, not “nuv”).
I offered a memory of my best friend in kindergarten pronouncing my name as “erbekka” because we had learned that the letter <r> makes an “errr” sound.
Someone else talked about growing up bilingual, and learning to read two different languages at once, particularly two languages that use the Roman alphabet to represent sounds differently: English and Mandarin Chinese (pinyin).

We also did a “Simon says” demonstration where Catherine followed instructions that I gave her. We discussed the kinds of instructions that were possible (this depends on the “computer” that you’re working with) and the kinds of feedback that the computer can give. We also talked about visible and invisible processes, and that computers are “stupid”: They can do only and exactly what you instruct them to do.

In the later part of the hour, we turned our attention to instructions relating to the production of human speech sounds. This part was mostly recorded, but please feel free to post your thoughts about it here.

The slides I used in class are attached below, for your reference.

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