Yes, I've spent nine of the last ten years doing various kinds of linguistics: four years of undergraduate study, then a year in Princeton Review purgatory, then five years of writing speech technology software (text-to-speech and speech-recognition).
Now (well, this fall) I'm going to grad school here at the University of Washington in the Linguistics department, but I hope to keep the computational focus. exterra just happened by the Center for the Deaf and found out about this talk and thought of me.
it fascinates to me note how my brain learns some language things but refuses to learn others
There are some really interesting questions about second language learning, and very few of them have been properly addressed, as far as I know. While everybody seems to be able to pick up new languages before age five or so, some people seem to be able to pick up new languages almost as easily throughout their young life, and a small minority seem to be able to pick up new languages well into adulthood -- and even old age!
The rest of us are stuck with the ones we get before we're 16 or so, or we just muddle along. That's my plan -- I'll be studying Arabic in the fall, I hope, and I'm a little intimidated. I hope it's not harder than Chinese -- at least the writing system will be easier.
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Re: small world!
Date: 2003-06-07 07:08 pm (UTC)Yes, I've spent nine of the last ten years doing various kinds of linguistics: four years of undergraduate study, then a year in Princeton Review purgatory, then five years of writing speech technology software (text-to-speech and speech-recognition).
Now (well, this fall) I'm going to grad school here at the University of Washington in the Linguistics department, but I hope to keep the computational focus.
it fascinates to me note how my brain learns some language things but refuses to learn others
There are some really interesting questions about second language learning, and very few of them have been properly addressed, as far as I know. While everybody seems to be able to pick up new languages before age five or so, some people seem to be able to pick up new languages almost as easily throughout their young life, and a small minority seem to be able to pick up new languages well into adulthood -- and even old age!
The rest of us are stuck with the ones we get before we're 16 or so, or we just muddle along. That's my plan -- I'll be studying Arabic in the fall, I hope, and I'm a little intimidated. I hope it's not harder than Chinese -- at least the writing system will be easier.