Author Archives: Kayleigh Glynn Beard-maguire

Why Can’t I Understand What They Are Saying?

I knew a guy once that moved to the United States with his mom when he was 14. Neither of them knew English at all at the time. When he started going to a public school and started working at a store in town, he was able to get a grasp on the language. Fast forward a few years to when I knew him, and he was able to speak really well. You could tell that he was still learning, there were words he didn’t know and a lot that he pronounced badly. But, all things considered, he spoke very well.

His mom was a different situation. She was a stay at home mom, and she focused on her son, and later her younger son. She spoke in fragmented sentences and I found that when I was around her I would talk like that too. Her younger son was born in the US and he did not have the Russian accent that his older brother had, and he often seemed to have a toggle switch in his head. He would say a few words in English and suddenly switch back to Russian.

I was always impressed by the difference between them. When I first met them I had no idea what they were saying, I was not able to find breaks in words, sentences, even thoughts! But as time went on, I was able to pick up on cues and I could hear words repeated and I started to pick up on the sounds I was hearing.

This, of course, led me to want to learn Russian. I had always wanted to learn something fun. I dabbled in German and French throughout high school and my time at Penn State, I wanted to change things up. I started trying to write the words and speak them. I was apparently not good. His mother often giggled at things I would say and he would too. His little brother would try to help. I found that I was speaking Russian the way she spoke English.

Why was it so hard? Well around 9-12 months of age babies start to lose the ability to distinguish sounds that are not in their native language (Sohn 2012). From there it is all down hill (for lack of better words). According to the same article written by Emily Sohn, after puberty there will always be an accent when speaking. Her article really made sense of why the three of them were so different. Yelena was in her 30’s trying to learn a new language, Andrey was 14, and his little brother Leo was born learning both at the same time. It isn’t impossible to learn a new language, but as we go through the years, it becomes more and more difficult to get the concepts of other languages. There are often times that I am still learning how the English language works.

 

http://news.discovery.com/human/psychology/brain-language-learning-1203191.htm

Names and Faces!

I have always been bad with names. I work in a call center, so luckily for me the name is spelled out in front of me and I can see it when needed. The members that I speak to do no always have that luxury and will often call me Hayley, Katie, Carly, or some type of similar sounding variation. For the few that like English artists from the 80’s, they can remember the song that I am named after. So this got me thinking, why are faces easier to recall than names? If I go to a bar, I can easily remember the face of the guy that bought me a drink hours earlier, but was it John? No, it was Kyle.

Why couldn’t I remember Kyle? In our lesson this week we learned about the levels of processing model of memory. LOP was first developed by Craik and Lockhart in 1972. The idea is that memories that have a deeper meaning can be converted to long term memory. What constitutes as a deeper meaning? How does it connect the “face vs. name” issue? From what I have found, we are visual learners (I know that I am). We can remember faces because we can relate to them. How someone appears can impact what we think of them. Are they attractive? How do they dress? When you hear a name there is not as much of a connection.

There are times when names are really easy to remember. When I met my husband, he said his name was Donovan and then quickly made a joke about a more famous person with the same name. This would be elaborative rehearsal. I was able to put his name with something that was already in my memory bank and then processed the information. His face had a name from the very beginning. When I met my best friend, I had to look at her work badge a few times the first few days and rehearse it, “Stephanie, Stephanie, Stephanie.” This is maintenance rehearsal, and is not as great at helping get information into your long term memory. After seeing her daily and doing things with her, I was able to remember it.

It wasn’t that my husband had a unique name, or that my friend has a more common one that hindered my memory, it was basic memory encoding. It is something that we all struggle with. When we meet someone new there is almost always an awkward moment trying to recall a name. Some are worse than others, but it is a normal thing. Knowing this made me feel a lot better about quite a few people in my life and the moments that I had to hope they said their name again for me without asking.

http://www.simplypsychology.org/levelsofprocessing.html

 

Why is this line taking so long?

I remember my son being born like it was yesterday. That was 5 years ago. Those years have been short. What? How could that be short? That’s 1825 days (1826 if you count the one leap year in there). Now, we are little past his 5th birthday so it has been more than that. The nine months waiting to meet him dragged on and felt never ending. But how does time seem to go differently? It works in short increments too. How can a work day drag on, but a vacation go so fast?

There have different studies that talk about our perception of time and the ways our brains can trick ourselves. According to an article written in 2009, our emotions can cause time to slow down or go fast. There was a study by Vons and Schmeichel in 2003 that showed suppressing emotions can make time go longer than if you let yourself feel it.

Go back to my example, I had so much anxiety and fear over meeting my son that 9 months felt like 9 years. There are days now that can feel that way (like when he acts up and decides that his little self is the boss). For the most part I think that the days are pretty fast and everywhere I find myself unprepared for holidays and big events. My son just started school and it was all so fast. Now we are only 12 short years from the college days.

I feel awful when I work all day because I feel as though I am missing so much. I am home with him at night and I get him ready for school in the morning, but that time seems small compared to 40 hours a week at work. This is a form of top-down processing, our brain uses “your abstract impressions(Cherry)” and from there we perceive on a sensory level.

There are many ways that we perceive. Using a big picture to help figure out the small is one way our brain does it. It can make time slow down and speed up, just based on what we are feeling and how we apply those feelings to what we are doing at a given time. We all have the same amount of time in a day. 24 hours, 1440 minutes, whatever you want to call it. We just all perceive it differently depending on what we have going on in our lives and how we feel about our situations. And, to quote my favorite show “people assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect but actually, from a non-linear non subejective viewpoint, its more of a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff” (Doctor Who)

 

http://psychology.about.com/od/tindex/g/top-down-processing.htm

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1525/1955

http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/06/10-ways-our-minds-warp-time.php