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Playing Catch Up

The past couple months has been a weird mix of doing a lot, doing nothing, traveling, and staying home.

So what exactly has been going on? Mostly thesising. I can't tell you how many times I've read through the same 60 or so pages, trying to find every way possible to make it even a bit better (hello, perfectionism), and I'm still not done! Granted, I have to finish in the next few days, and there was a slight delay due to my supervisor deciding a vacation in Greece was more important than a random master's student's thesis. It's been such a long process, and I am so ready to be done with it. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed parts of it, but it's really been the only thing I've been focusing on for over 5 months, and it's time to occupy my thoughts with something else...

A while back I wrote a short description of what my project was, and I bet you're all dying to know what the results are, right? Well, basically, I found that monolinguals and bilinguals can both tell the difference between beep and bip when they're 8-9 months old (cool side note: bilinguals can do it at 8 months, but monolinguals can't until 9 months, crazy, huh?). It also seems like the languages the bilinguals learn are important for this skill. If they were learning English or German in addition to Dutch, they could generally identify the difference, but not if they were learning Spanish, Italian, or French. I'm still trying to figure out why - ask me again maybe in like 4 years...

Besides staring at my computer, I've also been packing my bags the past three weekends and jumping from place to place. First Bilbao, then Groningen, then Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (stay tuned for a whole post devoted to this last one!). Now, you may be asking yourself, why is she going to all these places if she has a huge, important paper to be writing? Yeah, I had to ask myself the same thing - bear with me.

In Bilbao, there was this conference called the Workshop in Infant Language Development, which sounds pretty perfect when you consider what I've been studying. Add the fact that my academic crush was going to be there, and that I'm trying to find a way to work with her, and you pretty much have the reason I went. Overall, it was a pretty decent experience. I got to see a new city, learned some new things, and met some new people. So here are some pictures!

Guggenheim




The next weekend I was off to Groningen. This time to actually present at a conference, TABU Dag. It was a pretty weird experience. They had a very interesting set up where everyone introduced their project for 2 minutes, and then had a poster to go into more detail. A bit scattered for my liking, but good for my general dislike of talking in front of many people. And there was a surprise appearance by my madre!! 
Hey, look, it's me! (Photo by Miguel Santin)
This past week I went to Dubrovnik and took a day trip to Mostar - but you'll have to wait for that story! Right now I am trying not to loose my mind finishing up the thesis, selling my furniture, packing for my move back to the US, and trying to fit in all the last minute Dutch things I can! I fly back in 5 days. Where have the last two years gone?!

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Comments

  1. SapnaJuly 9, 2017 at 1:11 PM

    Great post Lena - good luck with your new job!! Keep in touch - I want to hear all about it :)

    ReplyDelete

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