The idea of language, speech, comprehending sentences, and the ability to learn not only one language, but many has always been very interesting to me. The idea that there are roughly 7,100 languages worldwide blows my mind. It raises questions about was there ever a universal language, what factors played a part in creating such a diverse linguistic society, and will more or less languages come to light over the coming years.

While reviewing and reading the lesson 11 material, I found Grices four conversational rules interesting. The rules of maximums of quantity, quality, relation and manner. Knowing that if one of the rules are violated, we unconsciously pick up on during conversations with others. Other violations of these rules can also be a cue to end the conversation. This is relevant to my life because I work fulltime in a retail related job and have many many conversations during the day with people. I did not know about Grices rules before this class, but I can vouch that now I will be more aware of them while others talk to me. I can also say that they are also very accurate, meaning that I think all conversations should follow those four rules. Something else that I enjoyed learning about was the McGurk effect. In the video, the sound did not change, but the motion of their mouth change so we heard a different sound. It pairs auditory and visual comprehension, and it seems like what we see is what we hear, even though sometimes the actual sound does not change. The McGurk effect plays a huge part in our language, sentence comprehension, and the ability to learn a language that we do not know…

This is relevant to my life, because I have three younger brothers and I remember when they were learning to talk. While watching the McGurk video, I found it funny with how he was slowly pronouncing words as if we were toddlers trying to learn a language. That is exactly how I talked to my brothers while they were young in order for them to comprehend and learn what I was saying. I remember when they reached the level of kindergarten and early elementary just how important learning English was. They had homework almost every night in regards to speech, the alphabet, and learning how to read. This makes sense because if we do not learn it early in life while we are developing there is a risk that later in life we will not be as strong in that given area.

Overall, I found this lesson to be intriguing and even made me want to do more research on my own about language, comprehension, and sentence formations to where they are understandable. I will also most likely use this information moving forward with my college career and with life in general.