Hey, Babe

My older sister is about to have a baby, and it got me thinking about baby talk. Everyone googoos and gagas over babies (admit it), and I've heard different things about whether you are supposed to or not. I've heard the argument that it does not help children develop and you should speak to infants in regular speech so they develop normally. But I've also heard that it actually does help even if the words are meaningless. Some researchers say that it develops a personal intimacy, and baby talk is more likely to catch the baby's attention. It is supposed to help the baby, since it babbles and you babble back, the baby receives important verbal feedback. I found this article online about baby talk since I was interested, and it really surprised me by saying that babies need it to form verbal connections, even if the words aren't really words. I was also surprised to learn that "baby talk" has several different names. It is also called "motherese" or "parentese" and is called Child-Directed Speech by child development professionals. So next time you see a baby, pull out your "parentese" skills-you're helping form that child's verbal skills!

dema dovo do?

I just got through taking this crazy test last Thursday for ROTC...probably the strangest and silliest test I have ever had to take. It's called the DLAB, which stands for Defense Language Aptitude Battery. It's supposed to measure your ability to learn a foreign language. If you score pretty high, there's a good chance that you'll be recruited to go into foreign languages. I was expecting something like the verbal or grammatical parts of the SAT, but boy, was I wrong. The entire test is in a made up language! You have to do things like connect how certain words are related and how they are formed, stuff like that. I'm not allowed to give any specific examples, but it was pretty much a language test in gibberish. I was trying not to laugh during the test because it sounded so funny, and there was a part where you had to memorize 5 or so "grammatical rules" of the made up language then rearrange the sentences to fit them..in like thirty seconds. Needless to say, that probably wasn't the highest score of my test. I'm not really sure how that measures your ability, but who knows...

Body language

I came across this article from Fox News on body language. The body language "expert" was being interviewed on how she analyzed Hillary Clinton's body language at various times. I found this interesting not because of any personal political views, but because I'd like to know if the body actually gives away more emotion than words. I think anyone can just spew random words, but how will we know if that's how the person really feels? I think it's important, especially now as we're preparing for presidential elections. The body language expert claimed Hillary Clinton was not being truthful about many of the things she spoke of. She also called Sen. Clinton's laugh artificial, even "evil." While I have no way of knowing Sen. Clinton's true thoughts, it'd be interesting to see if body language can be proven to give away emotion. I'm sure it'd be useful in every day life as well. Maybe you can actually figure someone out just by the way they're sitting or moving their faces. Maybe, if this technique is proven to be accurate, more crimes would be solved and conflicts overcome. I know many experts try to analyze body language today, but it does not seem to be worth much in court or things like that.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200709250011

no-pucckuu?

Today I was thinking about how different foreign languages are from English. I'm majoring in Russian, and we're learning basic words and phrases, and we've started to make simple sentences. It's pretty tough and a lot different than anything I have ever learned. I had just gotten used to Spanish after taking it for four years in high school! I had learned where to put the subject in the sentence and how to use adjectives to describe it. So now when I compose sentences in Russian, I want to put them in the same order we learned in Spanish. But Russian doesn't have a specific order, you can use adjectives anywhere around the subject-before or after, it doesn't matter. Also, they don't have the verb "to be" which I'm still trying to figure out. You say things like "She teacher." I guess it must make sense to Russians. It makes English, with all its grammar rules, seem crazy. You can tell what tense the verb is in just by looking at the ending of the subject...the word changes with past tense and such. It's hard to understand, but in a way makes more sense then a lot of English grammar.

My dad has hairy legs

My mom is the lead teacher at Barrington Child Care Center, and she often comes home with funny stories about what her kids say to her during the day. She told me that they think she has a funny accent (my mom's from the South) and always want her to talk. She said they tell her that she "talks funny". I'm not sure how preschool age children are able to tell the differences between accents, but I'm guessing since their parents sound different, they think my mom sounds funny. I never thought little kids would ever pick up on things like that. The daycare also has many children with disabilities. This one little girl in my mom's class has never spoken a complete sentence (she's around four or five years old) and can only speak in broken words. Then one day my mom put a movie on for the kids since it was raining out. It was a boring movie about building things and my mom said even she was bored. Then out of nowhere, the little girl yells out, "My dad has hairy legs!" My mom had no idea where this came from, since it had nothing to do with anything anyone was saying. It's amazing to hear what comes out of kids mouths. My mom is very proud and brags about how the girl spoke her first sentence in her class, even if it was about her dad's hairy legs.

tench-HUT

I'm in AFROTC here at UNH and last week we were learning how to march and drill. It's not that hard to follow the commands, but it's pretty tough to try to call them. In the military being able to give drill commands is very important. In Rotc we're eventually going to be graded on how we do it. Calling commands relies a lot on how you say the words. For example, to call everyone to Attention, you say the words tench-HUT, making the last part louder. Every command is broken up like this, and there are certain words you use a lower voice for and others that you use a higher voice. I was never sure why we did this, so I looked up the importance of voice inflection in drill commands. I found this website that explained everything, and it basically said that the loudness and certain way the words are said tell the marchers how to perform the drill movements. If the commander is quiet and does not give the commands correctly, the movements would be sloppy. So whenever you hear someone giving military commands, you know the inflection and "snap" of their voices show confidence and leadership, and is needed to have correct marching movements.

http://www.drillpad.net/DPcommandvoice.htm

Smarty Pants

I've always wondered if the way people speak really reflect their level of intelligence. I'm sure having a large vocabulary shows that you are fairly intelligent, and I know that some people have such bad grammar that you automatically assume they aren't very smart. But I don't think this is right in every situation. Just because you are smart, I don't think you have to talk to everyone using every vocabulary word you have ever learned. I know of a few people who do this and it really drives me crazy. Using big words doesn't impress me very much and I don't really think it shows how smart the person is. I consider myself to be fairly intelligent, but I don't speak to others like I'm reading out of a dictionary. I mean, is that really neccessary? Do people really feel smarter if they use words that aren't commonly used? Why do these people speak like they're writing a paper or something? I fully understand the need to be articulate at times in order not to sound like you're "stupid" but I don't think using "fluffy" words make you sound any smarter and a lot of the time, sounds condescending or like you really have no idea what's going on.


A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. -Herman Melville