I. DON'T. WANT. TO TALK. ABOUT. ARTICULATORY. DURATION. ANY. MORE.

NO MORE.

IDON'TWANNATALKABOUTITANYMOREDOYOUHEARME????

Oh my god, you guys, 26 pages of talking about the duration of articulatory movements.  I want it to be over, and somehow, it's never over.  There is always more to say.

I am so goddamned close to being done with this background chapter, and I just don't think I can finish it tonight.  10+ hours a day of writing for four days straight, and I'm having a really hard time keepin' on keepin' on.

All I have left now is to summarize my research questions.  And I have started doing so, but I'm hitting the wall again, where I can't think straight or form coherent sentences anymore.  I'm getting all spacey and glassy-eyed, and I can't tell what's important, or remember how I intended to finish my sentences by the time I'm a clause and a half in.

GAH I really wanted to be done tonight.  But it might be time to pack it in.

Good lord I am ready to be done.  I have made so, so much progress over the past few days, and I am getting so close, both temporally and work-wise.  I still have to write my discussion chapter, but I kind of don't even care at this point.  I mean, I know it's going to suck too, but I am just so, so close that I can taste it.

DO YOU HEAR ME, DISSERTATION?  YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED, MY FRIEND.



8/5, ETA: I just emailed my background chapter to my advisors.  I'm... kind of happy?  I guess?  But also kind of... vaguely angry that I just worked for about 15 hours straight.  (Such that obviously the only appropriate course of action is to whine some more to the interwebs.  Sorry.  This is my venting space right now.)  Also: feeling apprehensive that every day this week is basically going to be like this.

must... keep... going

I'm hitting the wall, and it's only 2:00 in the afternoon.  No good.

Well, back up.  This is a weird day for many reasons.  I got up at 5:00 this morning, as I have been for the past few weeks, and I worked on my dissertation until around 8:00.  Then I took my shower and ate breakfast and was ready to head in to campus to get ready for my class this afternoon, as I have been for the past few weeks.  And as I was leaving, I turned my back in a weird way, and it did that stupid, stupid spasm-y thing that it does periodically.  I usually get about one back spasm per year, and then I hobble around like an old lady for a few days before my back decides it's going to quit giving me grief.

So yeah, back spasm this morning.  Not a particularly bad one, but it immediately started stiffening up, like it always does, and I was hobbling around already.  I tossed back a couple Advil and started to head for campus, but it was hurting.  Now... I had been wanting to find an excuse to cancel class today, or let them out early, because I really, really need to get some serious writing done.  So part of me (the little devil on my shoulder) was hissing "dooooo iiiiiittttt... caaaaannnnccceeelllll", but then part of me (the stubborn goody two shoes part) was going, "don't be ridiculous, you're fine, go teach your class."

I made it about a block when I started thinking about what I would have done if I didn't have a dissertation to work on.  And I realized that my back was bothering me enough that if this were a different summer, or during the semester, I would have seriously considered canceling class independently of the fact that I have a dissertation to finish.  So the fact that I was being so stubborn and hobbling to campus anyway was directly tied to the fact that I had been feeling guilty about wanting to cancel class back when I didn't have a good enough reason to.

So I stopped walking, and I stood there for about 6 seconds, and then I turned around and went home and canceled class.  Because forget it.  I'm an adult.  Adults are allowed to have sick days, and this is basically a sick day, and one that I legitimately needed, because I can't really stand up straight right now.  (Which is totally legitimate.  I don't want to be struggling to stand up straight at the front of a classroom for 2 hours.)  The thing that's weird and extra lame about it is that then I felt like, "Hooray!  A sick day!  I get to stay home and work!!"

Being an adult: maybe not as cool as you had hoped.

So now it's 2:06 and I should be heading to my classroom to teach, and instead I am blogging.  I have gotten a tremendous amount of writing done today - which is freaking excellent - but I am hitting the wall.  And this brings us back to my opening sentence.  Part of me is like, "It's only 2:00!  Suck it up, quit being a wimp, and keep working."  But then I realize that I've been writing more or less straight for... 8 hours now, if you figure in some little breaks.  So, uhh, no wonder I'm hitting the wall and suddenly having trouble forming decent sentences.

The problem is that now I don't know what to do with myself, because this is normally the point where I would go for a walk to get some perspective and clear my head, but walking is probably not in the cards today.  Dude, back spasms suck.

So... I dunno.  Maybe I'll read or play the piano or something.

*sigh*

Man, it so comes in spurts.  I wrote a difficult section of my background chapter this morning, and now I just don't want to do it anymore.  I finally broke out of the guilt-anxiety-avoidance spiral a little bit - that horrible limbo where you can't make yourself start working on something because it just feels overwhelming and like you can't do it - so it was going relatively well.  But now I just have more difficult sections to write, and I just plain don't wanna do it.

Times like these are when I have to find non-difficult sections to write, like just summarizing other people's studies, because that at least keeps the juices flowing and helps me feel productive.  Confidence building sections, really.  So I guess I should find some more studies to summarize, and maybe that will help me feel better and get back into it.

I also have this problem currently where I keep rationalizing the amount of time I have left.  I was going to try to have this chapter done by tonight, but that's looking less and less likely.  So now... if I can just get it done sometime this week, I can spend all of next weekend revising my three existing chapters.  I think I can do revisions on one chapter per day, if I really buckle down.  And that leaves me about a week to write my discussion chapter...

TIME IS DISAPPEARING.  And I kind of don't like it one bit, because AAAAACK I HAVE TO FILE THIS THING IN 18 DAYS, but at the same time, there is a weird sense of relief beginning to creep up on me, just the tiniest tiniest bit.  I am so in the home stretch.  In 19 measly days I will be done.  I am so close, and yet so far away...

fast forward button plz thx

You know the part where I'm done with this dissertation, and with teaching this class, and with packing my stuff, and with moving in to my new place that's 3,000 miles away?

And I don't have to worry about how all that stuff is going to get done in the next, oh, three weeks?

Yeah, can we just skip to that part now?

On the bright side, I have the greatest advisors ever.  I got comments back from both of them on my last chapter, and I finally got brave enough to read them (it's scary looking at comments, because what if they have no idea what you were trying to say, or there's some huge fundamental flaw that you completely missed because you were too busy getting the stupid statistical model to work, etc. etc.) and they're just the. greatest.  So encouraging and understanding and helpful.  Basically along the lines of, "This is a good idea, and I can tell it's not quite there yet, but it's good, so you should do the best you can with it for now, and then keep working on it."  And also they keep saying things like, "I'm looking forward to continuing this conversation with you once you're Dr. Fricke."  So basically, the best possible way to talk a tired and frustrated grad student down off the ledge!

Oof.  I need to get back to work.

I think this chapter is done!!?!??!?!!1!

I seriously need a walk, but I think this chapter is as done as it's going to be for now.  I decided to not even bother with the introduction, because I'd rather hurry up and get it to my advisors so they can tell me if it makes any sense before I worry about writing a decent introduction.

So!  We are sitting at 103 pages, friends, and this chapter clocks in at 23.  Considering that that's minus the as-yet non-existent introduction, but includes 9 pages of the best discussion section I've written yet - it was like pulling teeth, probably because I came up with my own theory of how speech production works that seems to actually account for my own findings and a small slew of findings in the literature - it is a very significant 23 pages for me.  I now know exactly what I'm arguing, and I now have to go back and make the rest of this thing jive with what I'm arguing.

Allow me to continue tooting my own horn for a moment, and say that I analyzed all of the data for this chapter and wrote the entire thing in exactly 3 weeks.  That is progress.  And even if I'm a little behind where I would have liked to be by now, I really think this thing is shaping up, and I might even end up being somewhat happy with it.

Now... let's see what the advisors say.  :-P  Gonna go for a walk, re-read the whole thing, and then send it off.

THREE DOWN, TWO TO GO.  I GOT THIS.

horseshoes, hand grenades, and dissertations?

Almost.  Almost!  I almost made it to the 100 page mark today.  I really, really wanted to make it, but it's 7:05 and it's time to head over to G's and bottle the beer we started brewing a few weeks ago.  I'm about done for the day mentally, anyway.

But that means that tomorrow, I'm going to break the 100 page mark!  More importantly, though, it also means that I added 8 pages to the ol' diss today (no small feat), and also that I am closing in on the end of this chapter.  Just need to finish up the discussion section and write most of the introduction, which I can do in about a day and a half if I really put my mind to it.

I cannot wait to be done with this chapter.  Then I'll have a little over a month to edit, fix, and tie things together, but the bulk of it will be done.  Don't worry, you will get a triumphant update when I wrap this one up, probably on Wednesday of this week.

Chugga chugga chugga chugga...

o hai, VOT measurements

Why yes, I do have to re-take 4000 VOT measurements today.  It's what I do every day!

I have spent literally every day this week cycling through the same 110 sound files, labeling and relabeling and relabeling them.  Another team of researchers was awesome enough to share their data with me, and my first order of business was to replicate their findings.  (That's only the first order of business.  The more interesting part is supposed to be what I do after I successfully replicate their findings.)  I finally got some results this morning, and much to my chagrin, I did not replicate their findings.  So now I have to re-measure everything again.  Carefully.  By hand.

And if I still don't replicate their findings, then I have a very awkward situation on my hands.  Because they were kind enough to share their data with me, and then I have to be like, "Actually, I did this like four times, and there is now no possible way I can believe what you wrote in your paper.  Because no matter how carefully I do this, I am not getting what you got."

So... cross your fingers that this re-measurement results in a successful replication?  Because I am not re-doing these measurements another blasted time.  And I don't really want to have to write a paper where I say "um thanks but you guys were wrong".

Saaaaaad faaaaaaaace.  :-(((((

o hai, dissertation chapter

Whew!  First dissertation chapter finished and submitted for comments.  It's not perfect, but I think it's pretty good.  As good as can be achieved without knowing what's going to happen in my next two studies.

So... on to the next one!

ETA: funny that this link is getting passed around on my Facebook feed today.  Trust me, these are questions I have considered.

Happy 200th Post-iversary!

I didn't even notice that my last post was my 200th post on this here blog.  And to think that in the beginning I didn't even know if I'd keep it up!  It turns out I quite like blogging, so I think this thing will be around for a while.

Well, I made some good progress on the ol' dissertation this week, but I'm at a bit of a standstill.  The problem is my data set is so, so small that I don't really know how to do statistics on it.  I had what seems to me to be a decent idea just now, but I don't want to take it too seriously and type up all of my results based on this slightly wacky idea, just in case my advisors won't let it fly.  When you're doing your stats is not the time to get creative with your dissertation writing.  It takes a while just to do the stats, and then it takes way longer to write it up, and I don't want to sink a bunch of time into something that's just going to get shot down.  So thankfully, I am already meeting with one of my advisors tomorrow, and I'm going to run this idea by her and see what she thinks.

What this means for me is that I'm already very slightly behind on my self-imposed schedule, I think.  Sort of.  But I also think it'll be okay.  My plan is to spend three weeks on each of my three chapters, and then I will have one month to write up my introduction and conclusion before I start teaching my class in July.  Well, this is the end of my third week for this chapter, and it's not really done yet.  I've made pretty good progress on it, but I don't know if I'm going to make it by Sunday night.  We'll see.

I think it's okay because the data analysis shouldn't take as long for this next chapter.  I think.  Then again, I always think that, and then it takes way longer than I anticipated.  But I can start analyzing data for the next chapter while I finish writing the current chapter, and then I'll sort of be working on two different things at the same time, and that will probably actually be better than just working on one thing.  It is really daunting knowing you only have one thing to work on!  It just stares you in the face all day long, and if you don't want to do it, there's nothing else you can do to procrastinate, and you just feel guilty.  And you gotta watch out for that guilt spiral!

But now I don't know what to do with myself.  I need to start reading books or something.

ch-ch-ch-ch changes

Holy moly...

I mailed in a check for a security deposit on a townhouse in State College, PA today.  It is real.  I am moving there in August, and I even know exactly what my address will be.  And dudes, this place is ca-yute.

Speaking of real, I'm working on a presentation for our lab meeting on Monday, where I tell people what I think is happening with my dissertation data.  (Good timing, considering I just mailed away several hundred dollars, the need for which is predicated on me saying something intelligent about these very data.)  I am struck by how much more real my data seem when I put them in a Power Point presentation.  Maybe it sounds silly, but when I'm staring at graphs and numbers on my computer, or in my notebook, I feel like I'm kind of faking it.  But when I make a nice presentation with an intro and a conclusion and everything, I almost start to believe myself.  When you take random graphs and numbers and structure them into a reasonable story, with predictions and results and citations, it starts to become within the realm of possibility that I may have done or found something interesting.

(from xkcd)

well would you look at that, Part II

Pssssst.  I think something may actually have happened in my dissertation experiment.  Maybe not - it's too early to tell - but I made some graphs today, and it looks like something interesting might be going on.

I'm whispering because I am not getting my hopes up yet.  Instead, I am going to go back to labeling sound files so that I have more data.  And then I will come back and try again for real sometime next week.

In other good news, my grant proposal is also trucking along.  I did the biosketch (including the personal statement, grumble grumble... what am I, applying to college or something?) and I finished up the project summary today.  Progress, progress!  And a Skype meeting with my sponsor tomorrow, who will hopefully have nice and helpful things to say, and then I'm headed down to Stanford to see a very dear friend defend her dissertation tomorrow afternoon.

Go go go!

well would you look at that

I've been putting many hours lately into writing up a grant proposal that would give me three years of my very own funding.  It would be my first big grant, and I'm really, really hoping I get it.  (I'm keeping my hopes squarely in check, though, partially because of this crap.  Don't get me started on how angry this makes me.)  The writing itself has been taking a very long time.  I've been writing for a few hours a day, at least a few days a week.  Most days it actually goes pretty smoothly, but there were two or three days last week that were just like pulling teeth.  Write, erase, write, read, write, erase, read, erase, etc.  For three days in a row.  That was kind of rough.

Anyway, I have the bulk of the research proposal finished now, and I think it's getting close to its final form.  But it just occurred to me this morning why it's felt like so much work; they ask for 11 point font, single spaced, with half inch margins.  So even though it's "only seven pages", I just realized that that's actually a ton a text.  Just for fun, and to feel like I've actually accomplished something in the past few weeks, I plugged the text into a new document and made it 12 point font, one inch margins, double spaced, like most papers are.  And this thing is 20 pages long!  I've been working on a 20 page paper, and I didn't even know it!

(As a sidenote, it's been interesting realizing that this is what my life is going to be like for the next few months.  Roll out of bed, make some breakfast, and sit at my desk and write and analyze data for a few hours.  I've taken to going for a run in the evening, to clear my mind and to get out of the house for a bit, and all told, it's actually not a bad life at all.)

There are so many pieces left.  I have to write up a "biosketch" of who I am and all my qualifications, with a personal statement about why I'm qualified to conduct this research.  And some stuff about why Penn State is a good sponsoring institution to conduct this research, what their facilities are like, and what my on-the-ground support will be like.  Thankfully, my sponsors have done this before and have a lot of that language ready for me (especially since I've never actually been to Penn State, and the only stuff I know about their facilities is what I've gleaned from their website, and what they've told me).

So there's a lot left to do, but the big, hard part is almost done now, and I just have all the niggling little bits and pieces to pull together.

Today, I am giving my workshop on R again, and I need to keep working on analyzing my dissertation data, and then I'm getting Ethiopian food with friends tonight.  It's going to be a good day!

IT'S WORKING

OMG THE KIDS ARE LEARNING THE WORDS.

(Maybe.  I've only completed the first day of testing, but it kind of seems like it might be working.  Who knows if I will get interesting results, but at least I now have a non-failing methodology.  Little victories are important.)

oh the blog

Oh right.  I'm supposed to say stuff on here.

It's 2013!  And the past few days have been about 65 degrees and sunny (it is my experience thus far that January in Berkeley is considerably nicer than July in Berkeley), so I've been throwing the windows open during the day and trying to spend a decent amount of time outside.  I just got back from a really, really nice walk around town.  Well, back up.  First I accidentally spent the whole morning working.  I've started on a new project, and it's actually kind of fun, so the past few days I've been sinking several hours a day into coding.  On Friday evening, I thought, "Hey, I'll just write the first part of that script real quick," and then of course several hours slipped through my fingers... I'm not really getting any better at programming, probably largely because I only attempt it every few months, so every time I try to write a little program, I have to re-learn everything I've forgotten.  I am learning to think like a programmer a little better, though; when I approach a project now, I at least feel like I know where to start, and what the logic of the program should be.  It's the implementation (and the debugging!) that takes so darn long.

Anyway, I spent a few hours getting the outline of my script in place on Friday night.  And then I spent a few more hours yesterday getting it mostly working.  And then I spent all morning today tweaking and making it do exactly what I want it to do.  And now it's pretty much done!  It's totally done, actually.  I'm going to have to tweak little bits of it as I move ahead and decide I want to look at this or that little thing, but all of the machinery is in place and it's 100% working, so now I can just go in and change the little bits that will let me look at different stuff.  (I'm looking at word durations and sound durations in several dozen hours of transcribed spontaneous speech, so I had to write a program that will go in and find the particular words I want to look at and return the information I need.  So now I can find whatever words I want - I just have to narrow down which types of words I want to include in my analysis.)

After I finished writing my program to my satisfaction, it was suddenly 1:30 and I was still in my pajamas.  So I took a shower and then didn't know what to do with myself, and I decided to go for a long walk around Berkeley.  I was gone a little over an hour and a half - I went up through North Berkeley and down through the Gourmet Ghetto, stopped at Philz Coffee and paid too much for a cup of coffee and a cookie (because that's what you do at Philz), headed through downtown, and then looped back up to my house.  And it's still sunny and 65 degrees, and I'm so glad I got out to enjoy it for a bit.

I guess I should also write an update on the rest of January.  My talk at the LSA went quite well!  When it was over, I thought, "Well hey, that was pretty all right," and I think if you get to the end of a conference talk and you feel that way, that probably means you did about as well as you could have.  (Maybe someday I'll get to the end of a talk and think, "Yeah!  Rocked it!", but I'm not holding my breath.)

Now that the LSA is over, it's time to get back to thinking about my dissertation.  I'm going back to try testing more kids on Tuesday (after a much needed reprieve), so I'm feeling a bit anxious about that.  You may recall that my dissertation experiment has yet to really work.  So I've been re-thinking things, and I've decided to accept the fact that I can't do everything I wanted and scale my experiment back.  The upside is that the experiment itself keeps getting simpler and more doable.  The downside is that I can't really write a dissertation on it anymore, because it's a somewhat small project at this point.  So I've decided to supplement my experiment (assuming I eventually get it to work...) with a corpus study. (This is the new project I've been wading into the past few days.)  Now I'm coming at the same basic question from two completely different angles: an experiment with preschoolers, and a study of conversational speech produced by adults.  The trick will be weaving these into one cohesive narrative, but I think I can do it.  It's definitely changing the focus of the project as a whole, but I think it's the way to go.

So tomorrow will be spent in preparation for my day of testing on Tuesday.  Please cross your fingers for me that I'm able to finish getting things ready tomorrow, and that Tuesday goes smoothly.  It would be so great if I could get this thing to work.  (Serious understatement.  Bleargh.)

I also sense my plate already filling up for the next few months... I'm giving a workshop on the R statistical programming language (I never thought I'd see the day...) and I have to have a practice version ready in the next two weeks.  We're also having candidates visit for the phonetics job in our department, and as I'm part of the hiring committee, I'll be pretty busy meeting/entertaining/interviewing them over the next month or so.  And on top of that, I'm starting work on my NIH NRSA grant next week, as I need a working version done by mid-March.

Whew!

Life is busy, but quite good.  Or maybe that should read, "Life is busy, and quite good," because I always feel better about myself when I'm being productive.

That's it!  You're updated!

a weird kind of progress

As annoyed as I am that I have to re-tool my entire dissertation experiment (that's a story for another day), I must admit that I kind of enjoy playing around with Paintbrush and making scenery for my new and improved experiment.  There are much worse ways to spend an afternoon.

The made-up animals have to play *somewhere*!

Next up: forest.

good (non-productive, oops) weekend

There were so many things I was going to do this weekend, and yet, here it is Sunday night, and how many of them got done...?

Well, one, at least.  I accidentally started my dissertation today, I think.  I was going to write an abstract, but instead it came out too long and detailed, and I think it's now an introduction.  So hey, that's pretty awesome.

One of my good friends and her husband were also in town, and I got to hang out with them today, eat delicious Nepalese food, and talk to her about my dissertation experiment.  She's a great artist, and also a child language researcher, and she has agreed (happily, it seems!) to draw the pictures for my dissertation experiments.  I'm teaching words to preschoolers, so I need lots of fun, colored pictures of real words and the ones I made up for the experiment, and I think my friend is uniquely qualified to draw those for me.  They also helped me brainstorm about games I can play with the kids to teach them the words, and we came up with some really good, workable ideas.  So that was actually pretty awesome too.

And oh yeah!  I received the news today that the course I proposed has been approved for summer semester 2013, which means I'll be the instructor of record for a course on Language Acquisition for Berkeley undergrads this summer.  No direct supervisor, no one else in charge of organizing, giving lectures, deciding on course material and readings, just little ol' me.  I am teaching my very own class at UC Berkeley!  And I am ridiculously excited about that!

And I went out for Ethiopian food on Friday night with Jevon and another friend, and it was so so so good.

So really, I had an excellent weekend.  And it wasn't even that un-productive, I just... wanted to get some other stuff done and didn't quite make it.

Oh well.

interlude: a list of things

- WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PAPERS TO READ?  It is truly never-ending.  I do realize that that is the point of the whole pursuit - generate discussion to generate more experiments to eventually generate better understanding - but it's just this rabbit hole of tightly interconnected ideas and hypotheses, and you can spend your whole life trying to figure out where to start, let alone jumping in and contributing something worthwhile to the discussion.  Is this so abstract that it's completely opaque?  Now that I've decided what type of experiments I'm running for my dissertation, I have to narrow down what exact questions I'm asking, and how to set up the experimental procedure so I make sure I'm actually getting data that answer those questions, and not some other, related questions that I didn't mean to ask. I'm doing some word learning studies, so now I'm sifting through papers on word learning, and it's all so interesting, but absolutely paralyzing.  There are so many gosh darn variables, and I'm still figuring out which ones to try to ask questions about, and which ones I absolutely need to control for.  (Word frequency: should I systematically manipulate the number of exposures the kids get to each word, or should I let them get as many exposures as they need to learn all the words?  Memory consolidation: should I test them the same day I teach them the words, and/or should I make them have a night's sleep in between?  Should I test them on multiple days?  What if I count on testing them on multiple days, and then they don't want to be tested a second time?  Recognition vs. production: should I incorporate a word recognition task into the training, or just focus on word production?  If I incorporate a word recognition task, should I manipulate the phonetic details of the words they're hearing, so I get a test of whether they've generalized the phonetic information, or is that too many variables?  etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum)

- On the bright side, I'm very excited about what I'm doing, and after I sift through a few more papers, I think I'll be ready to go...

- It's a beautiful day out, and I have enough of a cold that I feel justified staying at home for the day.  So I slept in today and am now sitting in my screened-in porch style apartment with all the windows open, drinking coffee and taking notes on papers.  It's fantastic, except that there are so many papers to read (see above), and I have to take breaks periodically, because it's a lot of concentrating.  Hence the blog entry.

- I got paid last week!  So I ordered a new phone for myself!  Both things are very exciting for me, due to their very low frequency of occurrence; now that I've switched back to my fellowship, instead of teaching, I only get paid 3 times a year.  And I just never buy a new phone, because I'm perfectly satisfied being a curmudgeonly luddite when it comes to phones.  I don't want access to email and the internet 24 hours a day...

- One of my friends started a linguist intramural softball team!  So I played softball twice last week, and we have our first game next week!  It's really really fun to be playing softball again, but I'm fairly certain our team is going to be horrible, and that's okay.  It's more about the experience.

Okay, back to work.

Grad School WIN

I have the greatest advisors ever.  I really, really do, and I don't have enough good things to say about them.

They actually told me, in as many words, "This is a great idea.  And if you start having doubts about what you're doing - and you will, because we all do - just come talk to us, and we'll tell you to knock it off and get back to work, because this is a great idea."

Do I really have to leave this place and go out in the big scary academic world where I don't have wonderful advisors to talk me down and reassure me that I'm doing okay? ... I think I do, but not for a little while yet.

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.

running out of steam

I'm sitting in my beautiful apartment with all of the windows and the door open - it feels like I live on a screened-in porch when I do that, and I love it - and I am having a heck of a hard time forcing myself to work.  I am applying for a job at Penn State University which would probably start in January, and it has been incredibly stressful for many reasons.  Am I moving across the country in a few months?  Dunno.  Do I have to write an entire dissertation in 6 months?  Maybe.  Can I finish this dissertation chapter before I have to apply?  Definitely not, but I have to try anyway.  What in the hell is going on??  No idea.

So it turns out that getting divorced + the end of the semester + trying to write a dissertation chapter in two weeks + applying for a job = stomach ulcer, in case you were wondering.  I woke up with this awful searing pain in my stomach last Thursday, which went away after I ate some food, but it's been back periodically ever since then, and after doing some reading online, I'm pretty sure I have a stomach ulcer.  So that's interesting!  As long as I take some Pepto Bismol every once in a while, it's fine, but I'm anxious for my doctor's appointment to get here (it's on Tuesday) so I can get some antibiotics and nip this thing in the bud.  (Did you know that 70 - 90% of stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium that usually only gets a foothold when you have a compromised immune system due to stress?  I learned that this week!)

Anyway, things are mostly good, actually.  I've gotten a lot of work done in the past two weeks, and now I know exactly what my dissertation's going to be about, and I've even started writing it.  Crazy, right?  It's just that I'm in the home stretch of finishing up this chapter to send off with my application materials, and I have to finish up my 'statement of research interests', and I'm just... close enough to finishing that it's hard to motivate myself to just DO it, y'know?  I need to just do it.

Ok.  Self pep-talk over.  I'm gonna do it.  And then I'm gonna submit these things and wait to hear back about whether I have to write the rest of this thing and move to Pennsylvania in 6 months.  I have no idea what is going on, but I am excited and super anxious, in the good way and the bad way.

I leave you with some awesome pictures of my brain that I recently rediscovered.  I participated in a speech perception experiment at UCSF last fall, and they made MRIs of my brain, which I think are awesome and I'm going to frame them and put them in my office.

Look at that corpus callosum!  Look at that beautiful cerebellum!
And look at how huge the human tongue is!

Ghoooost faaace...  Ghooooost faaaaaaace...