Thesising: The First 2 Months

Most (if not all) of the people reading this already know that I'm in the throws of writing my Master's thesis. What you probably don't know is what in the world my project is about, and what I'm actually doing with the 5-or-so months I have to finish up the most important paper of my life to date.

Let's start off with the topic. It wasn't until early February that it had been finalized, so my apologies to anyone who asked over the holidays what it was about! Basically, my project can be boiled down to trying to answer a small part of the question what do bilingual-to-be infants pay attention to when learning their languages? Since that's a huge question, and I only have 20 weeks, it needed to be narrowed down just a tad.

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the jokes that stem from Japanese-speakers pronouncing r's and l's incorrectly. It turns out that when they were infants, they could tell these two sounds apart, but because the difference between them isn't important in Japanese, they loose this ability before their first birthday! This process happens with everyone in every language. For my project, I'm looking at the difference between two vowels in Dutch (think of the difference between beet and bit and you're pretty close).

There are some researchers who say learning two languages that are pretty similar should help bilinguals learn to tell these vowels apart sooner than bilinguals learning languages that are different. There are some other researchers who say the exact opposite. My goal is to figure out who's right. To do this, I'm testing 2 groups of bilinguals. One group is learning German or English, in addition to Dutch. The other group is learning Italian, Spanish, or French, in addition to Dutch.

How on earth do I know if the babies who can't really speak yet can tell the difference between the vowels? I play them 1 of the vowels over and over again until they get bored with it, and then switch to the other one. If they're still bored, they don't know the difference. If they're all of a sudden interested again, then they can the sounds apart.

Before I could even test babies (my first is coming tomorrow!), there were a ton of details that needed to be taken care of - the computer program had to be written, tested, and tweaked, the ethics board needed to approve the study, a giant questionnaire about the bilinguals' language environment had to be digitized, potential participants needed to be recruited and appointments scheduled. Add in reading research articles on top of research articles, outlining and writing the introduction section to my paper (currently clocking in at 20 pages), and the ever-present pressure to find a job for after graduation, and you have my life for the last two months. Ah, thesising

Accurate representation of me every morning heading in to school