Author Archives: Anthony D Ferrono

The Perception of Words Through a New Jerseyan’s Eyes

Throughout lesson 11, it spoke of how we perceive words that are used in sentences and single words. I know that growing up in New Jersey, we tend to say some words differently as they would in other areas of the United States. An example of this is that I say “wudur” instead of pronouncing “water”. Im sure this seems weird to a lot of you reading this, but its very interesting how different people perceive different accents and dialects. I went to school in West Virginia for my freshman year, and it was a complete language culture shock. They would call their lollipops “suckers”, and they would put extra emphasis on a single letter in a word such as “hammer” would sound to me like “HAMM-er”. This to me was interesting because being from the east coast, I rarely heard speech like this, but to them it was perfectly normal and I was the one who spoke funny.

An example of how words sound different to many people was demonstrated by Irwin Pollack and J.M Pickett. They recorded conversations of participants who sat in a room, waiting for the experiment to begin. When the participants were then presented with recordings of single words taken out of their own speech, they only positively identified that word 50% of the time (Muchinsky p298).  This is a perfect example of how people are able to identify words in conversation, but when those words are broken down into single words it then becomes more difficult. That is because the participant does not know the context of the conversation and thus the slanged or murmured word becomes almost unrecognizable. English is the sixth hardest language to acquire solely due to its evolution of slang. Teaching proper english is beneficial, but if a non english speaker was to begin a conversation with a native english speaker, they would not be able to carry a conversation. This is because we speak most of our words in a slang, that to us seems perfectly justifiable, but would confuse others.

From my personal history the biggest problem I had with understanding a foreign language was Comprehension. This is defined as the way people process language sounds, understand words and sentences expressed in writing and speech. I took honors level Italian throughout high school for three years, and if today you asked me to put a sentence together I would fail. This is sadly true because even though I learned definitions and meanings, I could never comprehend the sentence structure and thus was not able to produce linguistic sentences. I would have trouble with the Morphemes, which are defined as the smallest units of language that have a definable meaning or a grammatical function. An example would be the word “train”. Even though “train” consists of one syllable it has two morphemes, “truck’ and “s” (Muchinsky p298). For me learning a second language I could never positively use words such as train because I could no comprehend the past and present tense, along with the plural morphemes.  The perception of words is hard to master no matter what language you speak or where you are from. From my past experience I can say that I still have much to learn about language from the West, and from other cultures. But the way we perceive words will never change, we need to understand how our brain processes this, and use it to our advantage.

 

Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition. Wadsworth, Inc.

http://www.lexiophiles.com/featured-articles/results-of-the-hardest-languages-to-learn-poll

Anthony Ferrono- Blog Post 3

Short Term Memory Blog Post 2

Short Term memory is what all of us humans have in order to recall information that we processed in a quicker fashion. Short Term memory is defined “ the system involved in storing small amounts of information for a brief period of time (Braddeley 2009)”. As a matter of fact after reading that last sentence and trying to remember it you are in fact using you short-term memory. Not only do we have this amazing ability, but also I fear that most of us take it for granted. I would like to discus the effects of short-term memory, but more importantly the loss of short-term memory.

Short-term memory loss can happen a number of different ways, such as a lack of oxygen to the brain, alcohol abuse or a physical injury to the head (Zimmerman, LiveScience).  For me personally I played lacrosse for 2 years in college before transferring to PSU. Within those years I saw many people get hurt with a number of different bodily injuries, but the scariest one for me is when I got a concussion. This was thankfully my first and last sports injury, but being the nature of a brain damaged injury, I was nervous. Not all concussions lead to short term memory loss, but mine unfortunately did.  It is a very common injury in physical sports and I had no reason to panic, but I was scared because I could not get a grip on up verses down, and I felt sick to my stomach. Not only this but I literally had no idea what happened in the last hour. A concussion is defined as follows:

“It is the rotational movements of the brain inside the calvaria (meaning all of the cranium except for the facial bones) and the shearing forces affecting the upper reticular formation that create torque, which leads to the typical loss of consciousness. These forces also cause the brain to move in a swirling fashion and contact the inner prominence of the skull, particularly the petrous and orbital ridges and the wings of the sphenoid. Such movement makes the brain bump into the interior of the skull at the point of impact, as well as on the opposite side of the skull, resulting in contusions (bruises) that damage two sites in the brain, called the coup and contrecoup injuries (Richard Smayda, 1999)

The reason I had no recollection of the last hour was due to my cerebrum being hit and causing trauma and swelling. Thankfully I passed the test required by all concussions patients to take to make sure their brain has healed, and I was on my way.

 

Overall Short Term memory is a function of our lives that most of us could not live without. It would make our everyday grind that much harder, and simple tasks as what television show you were watching, or why you even went to the food store would almost be impossible to solve.  Our short-term memories as we all know can be produced by our long-term memory, but could you imagine that being your only short-term memory? What I mean by this is that if you lost your ability to conceive a short-term memory, you would only be able to remember things that were already stored in your LTM, and then transferred in your STM. Learning new material would be unbelievably hard and almost impossible.

 

 

Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition. Wadsworth, Inc.

Zimmerman, A. (2014, January 08). What is short-term memory loss?. Retrieved from http://www.livescience.com/42891-short-term-memory-loss.html

Smayda, R. (1999, April 26). What happens to the brain during a concussion?. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-to-the-brain/

-Anthony Ferrono

How the Temporal Lobe Functions

How the Temporal Lobe Functions

Have you ever hit your head hard enough to give your self a headache for days to come? When I was 13 years old this unfortunately happened to me, but on a larger scale. I was in a car crash where I hit my head into the sidecar window, fracturing my skull and collapsing my eardrum. I was actually deaf in my left ear until I received eardrum reconstruction surgery to allow my primary auditory cortex to fully function once again. Learning about the brain and its functions in this course is not only academic for me, but also a reminder of the how the brain recovers.

The topic that I would love to discuss is the function of the Temporal Lobe and how this section of the brain contributes to most of our functions we take for granted. The Temporal Lobe is in control of remembering memories, understanding language, hearing and mustering up emotion and so much more. In this course we learn how the brain is separated into different sections, and what their functions may be. For example the Occipital Lobe is responsible for our vision and how we perceive distance. The Parietal Lobe is in charge of skin senses, such as hot and cold. And the Frontal Lobe is responsible for all of these senses, and also is in charge of cognation.

In our books the author describes the how the temporal lobe receives and process sound:

“When sound stimulates receptors in the ear, resulting electrical signals reach the auditory receiving area in the temporal lobe (Goldstein 30)”.

This description of the temporal lobes function proves that we need it in order to hear and that the Temporal Lobe is a Primary Receiving Area of the brain. When the sound reaches the Primary Auditory Cortex, it sends signals to secondary areas, which allows you to understand and process noise.

Scientist’s discovered what part of the brain serves a certain purpose by examining brain-damaged patients. When I was in my car crash, my skull was fractured right above my Temporal Lobe.  Not only did this happen, but my left eardrum also collapsed, causing my temporal lobe to only process what I hear through my right ear. I was lucky that I did not have internal bleeding, but if I had damage to my Temporal Lobe I may not be able to remember quite as well, or even process sound.

This lesson in our books really hits home for me, because a few years ago I was hearing this information from doctors and not under my own terms. I really enjoy learning how our brain and body work in unison, and how much we now know about our minds.  Its truly fascinating to me that our brain is categorized into different sections, and that these sections have specific duty’s. Without our Temporal Lobe we would not be able to remember beautiful memories, or even hear things around us.

 

 

Works Cited

Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition. Wadsworth, Inc.

Anthony Ferrono