the agenda

Today, I've been reading about aerodynamics in speech production.  Aerodynamics is usually given the shaft in phonetics classes, I think partially because there's a lot of math and scary looking equations involved, and also because it's one of the least well understood topics in phonetics, in some respects.  Fluid dynamics is hard; even the people who are experts in this stuff aren't necessarily sure how to describe the way particles of air behave when propelled through the vocal tract.  You have to understand what the individual particles do, but also the way they all interact with each other, and how they react to changes in the medium they're traveling through, and obstacles in their path.

It's really complicated, but I need to understand it better, because a big chunk of my dissertation has to do with fricative noise, and more specifically, I'm going to be comparing fricative noises produced by adults vs. children.  I have to be able to wrap my brain around all the factors that affect the way "s" and "sh" sound, so when I find differences between adults' and children's speech, I can know what exactly to attribute them to.  Kids' fricative sounds are different not only because they're still developing the motor control necessary to produce fricatives at all, but also because their vocal tracts are constantly growing and changing, so at the same time they're learning to control and coordinate their exhalation and tongue movements, everything keeps moving around on them, so they have to keep adapting the way they do things as they grow.  That's not so much what I'm interested in, though - what I really want to know is how higher level factors (like word frequency and utterance complexity) affect low-level pronunciation.  So I have to know which fricative differences to attribute to differences in vocal anatomy and motor control, and which differences to attribute to psychological, sentence processing factors.  And that, folks, is basically the layman's summary of my dissertation, and a broad overview of all of the reading material I will be tackling in the coming months: fluid dynamics, speech motor control, developmental vocal tract anatomy, and speech production planning.

Depending on how much time I have, I'll probably throw bilingualism into the mix too, since so many of my preschoolers are bilingual, and it'd be nice to know how all of these variables behave in the mind of someone who's juggling multiple languages, too.  Add to that a need to improve my statistics and programming knowledge, so I can get my data and analyze it, as well as brushing up on my acoustic signal processing, so I can understand and justify what acoustic measurements I'm taking, plus the sheer number of man hours it takes to coherently write up such a huge project.  This is why I was partially flipping out about completing this whole thing by December, and why I'm really happy to have at least until May instead.  It is such a huge undertaking, and I have so much to learn and do, and so much knowledge to synthesize in some meaningful way.  It's incredibly easy to get lost in the details and start feeling overwhelmed.  What I've found helps is to just set small, accomplishable tasks for myself.  Today, I'm going to read a chapter on speech aerodynamics, and a chapter on motor control, or Today, I'm going to write a summary of the three main models of articulatory planning, or Today, I'm going to write a script that will take acoustic measurements for all of my fricatives.  That sort of thing.

What I originally wanted to say in this blog post, though, is that reading this chapter on speech aerodynamics is very heartening, in a way.  Speech aerodynamics is hard and complicated, and I'm not getting everything in this chapter, but I'm getting a lot of it, and that's a really nice feeling.  I was thinking about when I started grad school, and every chapter I had to read was so hard.  There was so much I didn't understand, and I just felt like I was wading through a stream of obtuse arguments that I could never properly evaluate.  Now, nearly four years later, I'm much better at reading things I don't understand, and better at getting something out of them, I think.  The trick seems to be to just keep hacking away at it; to keep reading and re-reading even when I don't get it, and gradually, over time, the amount of stuff I do get has become noticeably greater.  It's a slow process, but a really gratifying one when I step back and take a look at it, and when I don't let myself be overwhelmed by my lack of understanding.  It's weird to realize that even the pros don't understand all of it.  That's what makes it science.

It's very useful to me to explain what I'm trying to do and why in the simplest possible terms, and so as I move forward in my dissertation writing, I think I'll be using this space more often to write about what I'm doing in "layman's language" (or as close to it as I can get).  It's easy to get lost in discipline-specific concepts and constructs, and I would like to hone my ability to explain my research interests in a concise and understandable way.  If you get bored, dear reader, I'm okay with that.  :)  Posts like this are mostly for me, and if someone else finds them in any way interesting, that's a bonus.