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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 differ...
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Holiday FAQ

I know I haven't been super great about keeping this blog updated recently - you can (and probably should) blame the business of the first semester for wiping out all my energy. So this is my attempt to fill in some gaps and bring you up-to-date on my life in Montreal. Q: How's Canada? Good! It took a while to settle in, but Montreal is a pretty cool place to live. I still haven't been able to explore as much as I'd like, but there's plenty of time to make my way around. I have had poutine and bagels and plenty of Tim Horton's, so that's pretty much all you need. View of downtown from Mont Royal Q: How's school? Busy, but good. I had three classes this semester, and I'm happy to report that I survived stats, but I am very ready to put that experience behind me. I've also started two research projects. One is looking at how often and when parents mix French and English together when talking to their kids. The other is trying to figur...
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Crash Course in Linguistics

Innocent, well-meaning, new acquaintance: So what do you study? Me: Linguistics Them: Oh! How many languages do you speak? Me: *mentally picturing lasers darting out of my eyes* This conversation is well-known to virtually everyone who has ever studied the misunderstood topic of linguistics. To be fair, it's not a very popular one, so I don't expect people to know all of its intricacies. But I'd prefer it if people asked questions about it instead of assuming. To put it another way: asking a linguist how many languages they speak is like asking someone majoring in journalism which newspaper they study, or asking a doctor how many diseases they have. A bit odd, no? My goal is to make the conversation at the beginning of this post just as odd.  So - what is linguistics??? In the shortest definition, linguistics is the study of language. Note how that's singular. Linguists can  study a particular language or group of languages, but more often than not, ...
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