Due by 5pm on Sunday, April 5: Discussion Post #10 on the Ning
Imagine that you have received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of your target language and culture. How would you get started, and what would you investigate? How would different structural components presented in class appear in your work?
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As a lover and science and languages, there are so many different things I want to study. However, I think I would start with a study that is in nature personal to me. As a Chinese adoptee myself I always wondered if and how being adopted affects my language acquisition. I was adopted at 18-months old and my parents told me that I was babbling in Mandarin and maybe even trying to form rudimentary sentences. Now, I don’t know any Mandarin. Even though I was adopted fairly young, in elementary school in second grade I was sent to reading help because I was struggling to read at a sufficient level in English. My mother always thought this was because my brain was originally primed to speak Mandarin. I also had to go to a speech pathologist to learn how to pronounce my r’s. Coincidentally, I struggle the most with pronouncing rieul in Korean which is a sound that most closely resembles a mix between an r and an l. That being said, I always wondered if I would be able to learn Mandarin or speak the language a little bit easier and faster than other non-adoptees.
South Korea, like China, has an adoption program. I would conduct a study on the ability of Korean adoptees to learn Korean, specifically investigating if adoptees learn Korean faster than non-adoptees and if there is a critical age where language learning for a specific language severely decreases. I also wonder if there are any psychological effects from being adopted and removed from Korean culture. My hypothesis would be that Korean adoptees (adopted at a young age) would show at least some superior ability in learning Korean later on in life than non-adoptees.
I would need to have two groups of participants composed of early Korean adoptees who were adopted before the age of 2 and had no continued exposure to Korean and then a group of non-native Korean speakers who were not adopted. I would also screen and make sure that none of the participants have studied Korean before or have been exposed to Korean while growing up to hopefully mitigate the effects of confounding variables. Next, I would have all of the participants take the same Korean course of approximately eight weeks. I would have multiple assessments like written and oral tests throughout the course to help measure the speed and accuracy at which the participants were able to learn Korean. I would also like to know exactly where these adoptees have an advantage (if at all) and if they have an easier time with pronunciation. The phonetics we learned in class are very applicable to my study as I wonder if the adoptees would be able to pronounce and produce the Korean sounds with superior ease to non-adoptees. Perhaps the adoptees still have childhood memories of the language of the country they’re adopted from and have more of an ear for the language. The assessments of the study could include a conversation with a native speaker who can assess their pronunciation. I am not sure if this research would yield statistically significant results but I am still very intrigued by the possibility. I like this research question because it studies language acquisition in the sense of relearning a language one has basically forgotten and not been exposed to for a long time.
One of things that I have always found so interesting is the difference between the Korean languages in North and South Korea. As the two Koreas are separate, I think it would be interesting to conduct a long term linguistic study on the pronunciation and grammar changes of the languages in North Korea due to South Korea’s influence.
Although the North and South Korean people generally don’t have trouble understanding each other, people can tell in an instant where you are from based on your accent. The standard Pyongyang dialect in the North has distinct differences from the Seoul dialect. The first is pronunciation. The sound of ㅊ is [tɕʰ] in Seoul and [tsʰ] in Pyongyang. Therefore, it would be interesting to track the change in pronunciation of Hangul as times goes by.
Further, like other dialects around the world, North and South Korea have different words for the same objects. The majority of differences between the two Koreas has to do with the large amount of borrowed vocabulary. South Korea has a lot of borrowed words, mostly from American english because of the extensive trading that the two countries do. For example 주스 (ju-seu) and 샌드위치(saendeuwichi) are juice and sandwich in English. In Korean the difference is that they have their own accent to it. Some loan words are abbreviated or used in ways the original words were not used. For example 셀카(sael-ka) which means “selfie” that came from self+camera and 아이쇼핑(aisyoping) which means “window shopping” that came from eye+shopping. With the discrepancy in living style and access to the worldwide web, it is tough for North Korean defectors to adapt to life in South Korea since they cannot readily comprehend this as they live in two different worlds and do not learn to understand the evolving language as it changes. Since they had never been exposed to these English words so they had no idea what they meant. Now, apparently, language training has also become part of the assimilation process for North Korean defectors. In my research, I found that there’s even an app that translates English loanwords in Korean into North Koreans.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to just walk into North Korea and start recording peoples conversations. However, I think since North Korean defectors do exist, although I am not quite sure of how this all works, it might be interesting to see if this can be done by recording them to document their language. Especially as the defectors have an assimilation process and have apps to translate the evolving Korean in South Korea. I can see this as having an impact on the Korean in the North. As English affects South Korea, it will eventually affect North Korea. North Korea already has a difference in the pronunciation of sounds of Hangul. I imagine that as English affects the Koreas, this will further alter the grammar and pronunciation of the Korean spoken in the North. For other potential ways to gain access to Native speaker, I think it could also be worthwhile to document the dialect from people who escaped North Korea or some how no longer live there.
I wonder if in a couple hundred years, if the two Koreas stay separate indefinitely, how the dialects will change. I also wonder if the dialects will be completely unrecognizable from each other at some point, and essentially become different languages.
If I had a research grant to conduct a linguistic study, I would perform a neurolinguistics study on ASL. Specifically, I would look at the effect being deaf, and knowing ASL would have on the brain regions responsible for language such as the Boca's area, Wernicke's area, and the insular cortex. To perform such an experiment, I would have two experimental groups, and two control groups in this experiment. The two experimental groups would be deaf induvial who have been reared in ASL households, one group consisting of an equal number of males and females between the ages of 5-8 years old, and the second group consisting of equal amounts of males and females between the ages of 18 and 21 years old. The control group would consist of the same number of male and female induvial as the experimental group, except they were reared in hearing abled households. The reason to have two different age groups would be to observe and not any differences within individuals of similar communication modalities over time without having to design a longitudinal study.
I wonder how these areas would differ in those who utilize ASL compared to those who utilize verbal languages. Would one area have greater neuronal activity? Would one area be smaller in ASL speakers compared to verbal speakers? The insular cortex links sensory experience and emotional valence, and because ASL utilizes facial expressions and emotions heavily in signing, I wonder if this area would be increased compared to verbal speaking individuals. I also wonder if ASL individuals with damage to either Broca's area and or Wernicke's area, which we discussed in class, would be affected in the same way as speaking individuals. Because signing involves body movement and visual input for communication, I would expect that there would be some differences in the degree of impact to these areas in the event of damage. In order to test the activity of certain brain regions, I would put participants through a Functional magnetic resonance imaging system while they are communicating with someone of the same language modality. In the event that any of these participants, unfortunately, passed away during this time and they donated their brains to the study, I would perform different gram stains to determine the number of neurons and glial cells present within different brain regions.