by Patrick Joseph Clark
The time since my last post has flown by, due in particular to a very busy schedule. On Wednesday of this past week, Ben and I addressed Prof. Shu and a number of her students at the weekly Wednesday seminar here in “The Little Red Building” at BNU. Ben went first, giving an overview of his experience with fNIRS-based language research and the plan for his Beijing projects. I presented second, talking mostly about my role in the Brain, Language, and Computation Lab at Penn State.
I gave an overview of Dr. Jing Yang’s research over the past year, which namely investigated the relationships between working memory and artificial grammar learning, and working memory and novel word learning. I hope I was able to do her hard work justice in my explenation! I then discussed my plan for a lexical decision-based fMRI experiment to study the neural circuitry of highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals. Despite my aversion to public speaking, I hope the talk was interesting and informative. I was able to recieve quality feedback and new ideas regarding the most pressing hole in my study – the stimuli to be used in a lexical decision task. My segment was followed by a literature review by a fellow student, Mengmeng Su, who is focusing her research on genetic aspects of language – very cool stuff!
The next chapter of this adventurous week took us to the Beijing office of the American National Science Foundation. On Thursday, Ben, Nicole, Taomei Guo, and I travelled there to meet with Dr. Emily Ashworth, the director of the Chinese Office. Dr. Ashworth was very business-like, getting right to the facts and figures of our stay in Beijing. She gave us a lot of advice in a small amount of time. Logistically, she reccomended a more fluid monetary transfer system between our Universitites and a more intensive language-learning aspect of our stay here in Beijing. She also explained that we are American ambassadors during our stay in China, whether we planned to be or not. As such, we must be sensitive and respectful of different protocols in the lab and in the culture. And finally, she reccomended that we must experience – as much as we are able – what China has to offer in terms of history, cuisine, and culture.
The monetary transfer system has thus been modified, and will be much improved for the next group of Penn State students to venture to China. We have asked our Chinese colleagues and friends to speak more in Chinese than in English when we eat together in the dining halls or gather socially. Already I have experienced an improvement in my Chinese vocabulary! And as for seeing as much of China as possible, Ben, Nicole, and I took this advice to heart and immediately went to the train station and purchased high-speed train tickets to Shanghai for this upcoming weekend! On the advice of Nicole’s Chinese friends from Penn State, we already have a busy weekend in store for this Saturday and Sunday. Wish us luck! We also had a couple of excellent sight-seeing days this weekend, but there will be more about that in a later post – thanks for reading!
