In the midst of this pandemic and quarantine, PIRE research has been keeping me busy and occupied. I’m grateful that we can all continue working on our projects this summer, even if things didn’t quite go as planned.The past few weeks have been dedicated to preparing the stimuli and working on the structure of our norming experiment. The goal is to present the manipulated audio recordings, for each member of a minimal pair, to native English speakers in order to choose the most ambiguous recording of each pair for the main experiment. We are going to use the recordings that native English speakers have the hardest time categorizing in order to ensure that the acoustics of the /æ/ and /ɛ/ vowels are identical before presenting them to Dutch-English bilinguals. I have been doing a lot of work in Gorilla to structure the experiment. In addition, this week I spent time doing some work in Praat to trim off the silences before and after each word. Every week I get a little bit better at doing the work, and I’ve noticed I’m starting to become more efficient. I am learning so much and it feels great to be making significant progress from week to week!
Every week, I try to think of a few positives that have resulted from not being able to go on the PIRE trip to the Netherlands rather than dwelling on it. Most of those positives revolve around being able to spend more time with family, which has been very nice. In the past few weeks, my family has been able to go camping, celebrate Father’s Day together, go on afternoon walks, and much more. It’s certainly disappointing that I’m unable to spend this summer living and experiencing life in the Netherlands, but thinking of the positives and finding joy in the research has definitely helped a lot!