by Sara Carter
This past week seemed to have been more filled with activity than any other period of my time here since perhaps the first few days after arriving in Granada. The beginning of the week was absorbed with fairly intensive preparations for our somewhat formidable (or so it felt to me) presentation that we gave at this week’s lab meeting on Wednesday morning. I must say that without Amelia’s extensive help in analyzing the data I have so far to be able to include my preliminary findings in the presentation and suggest what they might indicate, I would have been hopelessly lost in terms of making sense of the raw data. The two nights before our presentation were spent sitting for hours on our living room couch at our apartment with Amelia, who individually showed Clair, Emily and I how to use the program to run the statistical analysis on our respective data. As we are each using the moving window paradigm and measuring the average reading time per word, she helped each of us to identify which words would be most important to look at for the purpose of examining the results of the critical region for each of our experiments. Amelia then walked us through how to do the statistical analysis for the reading times of each of these respective words and pointed out which of the resulting numbers we needed to look at to get a sense of what our data was indicating so far. After she showed us how to make graphs of these figures to enable us to better evaluate our findings as well as to include them in our PowerPoints, she offered to talk through with us how the trends exhibited in our graphs were related to what each of our experiments test. When we looked at my graphs it appeared that my participants were manifesting longer reading times in the critical region for the conditions in which the complement that followed the verb did not accord with the reader’s expectations, as established by its “bias.” This was indicative that verb bias was taking precedence in guiding the readers’ sentence processing, as is the case with native English speakers in their L1 environment, a finding that is consistent with my predictions. As I only had data saved for 13 participants, however, the averages were not yet statistically significant so it remains to be seen if this will continue to be the case as I look at the data from a larger group of participants. Given that none of the three of us have experience with data analysis, it was absolutely crucial that Amelia was so willing to put so much time and effort into ensuring that we were all confident that we were able to speak comfortably about our work so far.
The presentation itself went fairly well, though I suspect that my somewhat more than slight anxiety was fairly evident, particularly when I first began talking (rapidly, rather mechanically and with the occasional seemingly interminable pause). Once I got into it a bit however, I became more comfortable and started to speak more naturally, as if I were just having a conversation with someone about the work I was doing rather than standing up in front of a group of dauntingly bright individuals. I was also extremely impressed with Emily and Clair, both of whom spoke with a great deal of confidence and did an awesome job of clearly explaining their projects and what their data has indicated so far. It was really affirmative to see that the people from the lab seemed genuinely interested in learning more about verb bias, which is what Amelia, Emily and I are each looking at with our projects, and were asking questions that I felt reflected a real desire to better understand the underpinnings of our research. But what really made me feel great that morning, regardless of the outcome of the presentation itself, was when a member of the group that I barely knew, having had only had a few brief conversations with her, came and talked with me briefly before the meeting. Perhaps struck by the deer-in-the-headlights air I was likely exuding, she sat down next to me outside of the room in which the meeting was to be held and reassured me that the tone of the weekly meetings really was above all casual and relaxed and that everyone would just be interested to hear more about how things had been going with our work during our time in Granada so far. Although my project is absolutely nowhere near the level of that of anyone working in Teresa’s lab, given that my time in Granada has served as my real initiation into research, her comments made me feel like I was one of her peers. Above all, this experience of presenting my research in Spanish will definitely serve to undercut any misgivings I may have about the presentation I will be giving at the CLS meeting in the fall, as speaking about my project in English is comparatively innocuous.
This past Monday ushered the Festival of Corpus Christi, which is said to be the biggest celebration of the entire year in Granada. If I thought that the process that commenced last week of adorning virtually every single street in the city with lights was any indication of the scale of the celebration that would occur, I was quite mistaken. The entire affair began on Monday night with the opening of the “Feria” in a complex on the outskirts of the city, which is a typical fair like one that would be found in the United States with rides, massive stuffed animals and stalls offering an astonishing variety of fried foods. I didn’t end up making my way over there until Sunday however, an endeavor that left me with the impression that I could just as well have foregone the experience without any real loss. On the evening that Clair and I headed over to the fairgrounds to have a go at the rides, we found ourselves on the bus back to our apartment roughly ten minutes after arriving. As it turns out, the “Swinging Ship” ride would be more appropriately titled “Careening Ship,” and what appeared to us to be a gentle, gliding back and forth motion was more of a violent lurching, prompting a minor anxiety attack on Clair’s part and incapacitating nausea on mine. The real festivities in the downtown area began on Wednesday afternoon when, as I was taking the bus back from the university, I was confronted with a veritable army of people converging upon one of the major streets of the city. They had gathered to observe “La Tarasca,” a traditional parade that takes place every year as part of the festivities in which the central figure in the procession is a statue of a woman on a dragon. The following morning was the parade for the Corpus Christi, the main day for the religious aspect of the Festival about which I know effectively nothing other than its general significance underlying the events of this week. This parade was a bit longer than the Tarasca and consisted of the procession of a large throne carried by a group of people, along with a series of individuals holding up ornate tapestries affixed to the tops of poles. The crowds at both of these processions were so immense that we were barely able to see over the sea of heads to get a good view of the actual parades. Regardless, the celebratory atmosphere that pervaded the city throughout the days of the Festival was in itself a great deal of fun and made me really glad that this event coincided with our time in Granada. Such was the scale of the celebrations that the ordinary goings-on of the city halt for the duration of the Festival, and even the entire University closing for both Thursday and Friday, thereby forcing us to take a break from our work and join in..
As an International Relations major, I’ve found it to be a very unique opportunity to be living in Spain during such a critical moment for the country in the financial crisis that is effectively bludgeoning the European Union. Although I will be the first one to admit that I am not as informed as I could be as to the trajectory of the crisis within Spain specifically and certainly fail to understand the economic details of its underpinnings, I have been making an effort to follow the most recent developments while I’ve been here. As someone who suffers from a fairly entrenched New York Times dependency at home, I have been doing a bit of reading on the subject in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, one of the country’s main daily national newspapers. Though certainly quite a bit different from the New York Times, I have found it really interesting to be able to read about the European financial crisis in sources from within the area that is actually experiencing its effects. Reading about Spain’s economic circumstances in a Spanish newspaper and being able to walk down the street and see signs in windows advertising “crisis prices” or hear people talking about their concerns has given life to an issue that I would undoubtedly be reading about in an American newspaper if I were at home. Distance and frequent coverage can often have the effect of desensitizing us to situations that seriously impact the lives of other people, a tendency that almost certainly would have been active in shaping my view of this had I not been here in Spain. It is additionally interesting to read reporting about the United States from the standpoint of Spanish press. I read an article in the paper a few days ago about comments made by Obama as to the necessity of a stimulus strategy in Europe to prevent a worldwide recession that would hinder the economic recovery of the United States; the article had made the front page and continued to a spread of three full pages with a large photo included. At first it seemed entirely natural to be reading at such length about my own president, but upon considering how much coverage this same remark had likely received in American newspapers on that day (perhaps a reference to it in a more general article, if anything), it was made me think about how greatly the emphasis placed on an event can differ between two countries that are not drastically different from one another. Having this exposure to foreign news to be able to compare with that of the United States has thus been really valuable in learning to take into account the multiple perspectives from which a certain situation can be documented and thus to consider a source critically rather than just reading a story and accepting it as fact.