by Emily Rae Sabo
And so the research finally begins. Monday May 7th was our first official day at the University. Alvaro, Amelia, Melissa, Clair, Sara, and I all walked together to the University at 8:45am to have a meeting with Teresa Bajo, our abroad research advisor. During this meeting, I explained to Dr. Bajo in Spanish what exactly my study consists of, what kind of participants I am looking for, and what strategy I have come up with for getting everything done. I consider my spoken Spanish to be very good, but I admittedly found it very challenging to communicate such specific jargony linguistic terms such as “behavioral tasks” and “verb bias” in Spanish. But there’s nothing like a little academic scaffolding now and again, eh?
In other news, Teresa informed us that I, along with the other PIRE researchers, will be presenting our work to the department in a couple weeks’ time. This is exciting for me because I know I will be doing something like this back at Penn State once I return. However, this presentation will be a bit more fun (and also a bit more daunting) because I’ll be doing it in Spanish. I already asked one of the grad students, Manolo, if he would let me run through a prototype of my presentation beforehand; being the nice guy that he is, he said yes. So if he can help me work out a few of the kinks in terms of my Spanish, I will be able to worry less about language obstacles and more about the content of what I’ll be presenting.
After our meeting with Teresa, Clair and I made carteles (flyers) to put around the university and the city for participant recruiting purposes. Then we set up our Internet accounts with the university. I also went through each of the four archives (files) of my experiment and fixed any errors I saw. This means I reworded some of the experiment instructions and fixed one of my experiments, which was crashing all of the sudden due to a previous coding error on my part. After finishing our work for the day, the students and I grabbed lunch at La Plaza Nueva. Then I decided I wanted to get a good Spanish novel to read, so I stopped by la Biblioteca Publica (the public library) to borrow one. I originally wanted to check out a Federico Garcia Lorca book because he is, to date, the most prominent literary figure in Granada. However, the librarian reminded me that due to the period in which Garcia Lorca wrote, his works are very old-fashioned and they contain syntactical structures and lexical items that not part of our present day Spanish. So he recommended something a little more contemporary for me: a novel entitled Donde el corazon te lleve, written by an Italian author Susanna Tamaro. I’ve only just started it, but I’ll let you know how it goes. After reading near el Paseo del Salon for an hour or so, I met up with Alvaro and Manolo (which I learned is derived from Manuel) para cenar (to have dinner).
On Tuesday, we all walked together again to the University. We spent the day transferring our experiments from our computers to the one we have in our lab. Then Alvaro and Amelia walked us through each of the behavioral tasks and how they work. This was a good review for me because it has been a little over four months since I’ve last run a participant. We also discussed and finally settled on a good way to organize the files and folders on the computer so that everyone feels comfortable. As expected, some of the components of the behavioral tasks had kinks. But Alvaro worked them out with another grad student, Jose, from the lab. Because the five of us from Penn State only have one lab room with which to run participants, we started talking about how we should go about planning participants and scheduling. Our solution was to set up a Google Calendar; we will use this to organize participant scheduling. The only potential drawback here is that because the four of us undergrads do not have Wifi in our apartment, we will have limited access to the Calendar. But not to fret: we shall just simply frequent cafes and Wifi kiosks so that we can stay up to date on the most current participant schedule. In general, I spent most of Tuesday contacting potential participants and coding LHQ (Language History Questionaires). Overall, very productive.
On Wednesday, things started chugging at full speed. We ran four participants and each of them went off without a hitch. In these sessions, Amelia ran her experiment in addition to our shared behavioral tasks. Each of the participants scheduled with us to return sometime during this week or next to participate in both mine and Clair’s study (which we expect should amount to approximately 1.5 hours per session). I shadowed Amelia as she ran one of her participants just so I could see how the lab works and how she deals with participants. After having watched her run a participant, I can say I feel more confident in running my own.
Because many of the grad students have gone to Belgium for the week to collect data, la sala de becarios (the grad student/scholarship work room) had many open seats this week. So, I worked there. As I worked, I got to met Francesco, a grad student from Italy and Alicia, a grad student from Mexico. I asked them a few lexical questions about words I had read earlier in the day from the University’s newspaper (Aula Magnum), and they were very helpful in teaching me what these words mean in context. But as far as work, I spent my time today updating our list of participant recruits and also started coding the rest of the LHQs into our master file database. This took me longer than expected because I am still getting used to the programs we use (like Excel and Googledocs). But as we say here in Granada, “paso a paso” (step by step). After working today, Alvaro and I walked around the Alhambra and he gave me a brief overview of its history. Later on in the day, I met up with some of the people from the lab to get tapas.
Friday – On Friday, I ran my third participant, Francisco. And as it turns out, Francisco is from Quito, Ecuador (which is where I will be studying abroad in the spring). So, he and I went out for tapas that night and he told me many things about the city. For example, I learned that the delicacy dish there is guinea pig (yum!). Francisco also speaks German, so that was fun because he taught me how to say “My name is Emily” in German. He showed me his part of town (Realejo), which I had yet to explore. Realejo is the old Jewish neighborhood of Granada, and I must admit that it had some of the best tapas I’ve eaten yet. The ambiance of one of the restaurants in particular was especially inviting because it has a separate little room full of candlelight, indie music, old worn books and big comfy sofas. It was very relaxing and a great way to start the weekend.
Saturday – On Saturday I went to the beach with the PIRE/Granada lab crew. The first thing of note is that the Mediterranean is FREEZING. But for my adrenaline junkies out there, it really gets the heart pumping. After relaxing on the beach and listening to some of Francesco’s (grad student at the University) Italian music, we all grabbed coffee at the beachside café. When I got home, I went for a run with Melissa and Clair and after a quick shower, we all went out to dinner together.
Sunday – On Sunday, I woke up and immediately went to the café Esmerelda (the café us PIRE undergrads have been frequenting for Wifi). I took care of some business, including responding to and sending emails, contacting possible participants, refiguring my Gmail calendar…etc. And of course it was Mother’s Day, so I got to talk to my mom on the phone for a few short minutes. First time since I’ve gotten here!!! I remember it being really hot on Sunday and I got a little overheated. But after figuring out how to work the air conditioner in our apartment, the world was again at peace.
Monday – On Monday I ran four participants, which makes me feel really good about our recruiting numbers. Because Alvaro and Sara are now starting to run participants as well, Clair and I moved to another cabina (booth/lab space) so that we could both run simultaneously. Well, that’s all for now. Chau!