SUN! and a bit of research

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It’s been extremely rainy for about two weeks now. However, yesterday we got a break in the weather. I took advantage of the weather and traveled with my professor out to one of the islands outside of Bergen. While he worked on a research thesis with another professor, I walked down the road across a few bridges to another island about 4km away. The weather was beautiful for walking. The sun was shining at it was about 65-70 degrees out. We haven’t had a “warm” day in a while. I leave warm in quotation marks because it’s all relative when it comes to Bergen weather. Although for a girl like me from Arizona, I don’t consider 65 degrees warm, with the 50 degree, rainy weather we have been having lately, I will make an exception. I had the afternoon to myself. I reached the other island around noon and found a secluded cove. I spent the afternoon sunbathing on a rock reading a book. I didn’t see a single person for three hours. It was very relaxing to have a day off, and nice to enjoy some sun finally.

Today it’s back to rain, rain, rain. It looks like our next break in the weather isn’t for another week. I still haven’t got used to wearing so many layers of clothing when it is supposed to be summer, but I’m not in a hurry to get back to Phoenix or Tucson weather.

I have about two more weeks of research before I will be traveling. I am still in need of two more research subjects for my study. It’s been difficult to find people, especially guys, who haven’t had concussions. I’m hoping to finish data collection early next week and begin some analysis.

For those of you who asked for a short description of my project I write the following. My research project is being conducted in order to determine how a person’s native language may affect the way they learn a new one. I am using three populations: Norwegian speakers, English speakers, and tonal language speaker (i.e. Chinese). I am testing 20 subjects in each population. Subjects listen to a synthetic language on my computer and answer test items about it. The synthetic language contains aspects of word order and stress. We are trying to determine if subjects have a preference to leaning word order or if they have a preference to learning stress. We predict that English speakers will have a word order preference because in English meaning is derived from word order. On the other hand, in tonal languages meaning is derived from stress so we predict that tonal speakers will prefer stress. We think Norwegian speakers may fall somewhere between because their language contains both elements. In addition, we are trying to determine which group can learn a difficult word order task with special stimuli that highlights the difficult pattern. I am not able to do any comparisons between the populations because I have only gathered Norwegian speakers thus far. However, we have found that Norwegian speakers are currently unable to learn the word order component. This may be because they are confused with the stress components.

I hope that answers some questions. I know it’s a bit confusing, but feel free to ask more about it.

Back to work for me.

Ha det, Allison

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Photos

A pond on the island
This was one of the many ponds near the road

Me by the water
I was alone so I had to take a picture of myself to prove I was there

Flower by the water
This flowers were in bloom all along the road.

Sparkling water
The sun made the water sparkle

My secluded cove
Not a single person was around.

Comments

[Ed Shannon]

Research
Grandpa Shannon doesn't want to ask any question about your project as he will probably get more confused than he already is!!! Love ya!