One of the things that I really appreciate doing in the lab meetings at Penn State, after reading a text, is that Dr. Jackson will go around and ask all of the lab members to rate the article on how difficult it was to read on a scale of 1-10. It’s nice to know when you think a text is particularly hard to understand that most other people felt that way too. This past lab meeting was the first time since I’ve been in Braunschweig that the meeting was about a text (because usually people were presenting their work). The text was a manuscript draft of Charles Yang’s “A Formalist Perspective on Language Acquisition”. In Holger’s lab, we did not rate the text, but I would have rated it about an 8 or a 9 because it was quite difficult, mostly because a big part of the paper is Yang discussing various mathematical models for physically calculating the success that different people will have with learning grammar based on the amount of vocabulary they know. I have never come across an idea like this, trying to put a quantitative measure on something that I would say is qualitative, but it was very interesting to hear. I’m still not sure if I quite grasped all the main ideas of the paper, but Holger broke it down for us really well to make it more digestable. What I did notice personally while reading, though, was that while the content was rather difficult, I still felt like after this experience that I was able to read it a little smoother. After hearing talks from the conference, doing my own research, and hearing other lab members talk about their research, it seems to be making an impact. This more consistent exposure to language science almost everyday hasn’t made it completely clear to me, but I think my understanding is a lot less fuzzy.
