Group 4 Language Blog

Pete Obourn, Andrea Testa, Amy Graham, Michele Tanous, & Kate Walsh

Hi. My name is Michele. Like many others in this class this is my first time blogging. Had a few difficulties at first, but that should all be taken care of and the site should now be ready to go for the rest of the members in my group.

To start off, I am a junior majoring in Neuro/Psych. I am from Buffalo, NY and am a really big Sabres and Bills fan. I have been to both France and Germany, and though I am no expert in an other language, let alone english, I find language to be a very fascinating topic. I took this course to learn more about the ways in which we learn to communicate, and hopefully some of the neuronal processes involved. I look forward to reading the views of others and am also anxious to see how this blogging thing goes.

Hello All. I am Kate Walsh, and like Michelle, this is also my first time blogging. To tell you a little bit about myself, I am a junior and am double majoring in Studio Art and Psychology. I am from Rochester, NY and I have traveled around the United States some with my family. I have also traveled to Estonia with my grandparents to learn about my heritage. During these trips, and also being here at Allegheny, I have become interested in the way people speak. This includes myself, as I have been told numerous times that I have a nasal accent. I love listening to people's accents and their choice of words. I look forward to learning more about this throughout the semester.

Hello my name is Pete Obourn and I am also from the great state of New York. It seems that we have our own little New York posse forming here. Like Kate I am from outside of Rochester. And, like Michele I am a huge Sabres and Bills fan. So our group seems to have a lot in common. To be perfectly honest, I am taking this class because I need to fulfill my minor requirement. However, I did choose this class over the rest of the upper level psych classes because it looked very interesting. There is something about language and communication that is very intriguing to me; and based on what I have heard and read from others in the class this seems to be a mutual feeling. I am a first timer at this so I do not know how it will go, but I hope that by blogging we can all learn from each other by sharing out opinions and questions about language. So Sabres!

Heeeyyy my name is Amy Graham and I'm a junior Psych major from Greensburg (about 40 minutes outside of Pittsburgh). I guess I'm going to have to go against the group because I'm a HUGE Penguins hockey fan. I'm taking this class because I've started looking into possibly pursuing Audiology/Speech Therapy in the future because of my interest in language. I've never blogged before but now that I know how to do it I have high hopes that this will work out well! I deleted the email about my username & password (oops!) so I'm going to have to post under your name Michele, sorry!

This question of, "what is in a meaning?" has been driving me nuts all day. I can not come to a comfortable conclusion. I looked it up in the dictionary, strictly due to my persisting curiosity. I found that, according to Webster's unabridged dictionary, meaning is "the sense in which something is understood." So then what is understanding? This idea of meaning seems almost impossible to define; yet I think it is safe to say that meaning is in some way an association between what we hear or see and how our brain reacts neurologically as a result. It also seems reasonable to assume that our neurological reaction will be based on previous experiences. So, if meaning is based on previous experiences, then how did we first come to understand? This again is something that has been driving me crazy. It is so complex and innate that we may never fully understand how it works. However, we can take the information we have and try to theorize about what is going on.

The best explanation that I can come up with is that there is some point in our infancy that for the first time we make an association, perhaps even before we can speak. To me this would be the first time we understand. One might argue that, "what if a baby mistakenly associates a bottle as a rattle?" Is this still understanding? Well that raises the question, who determines whether an association in someones mind is wrong or right? Nobody does. Clearly, there would be a problem if the child grew up thinking a bottle was a rattle, but this is highly unlikely. At some point the child will correct this association, or change it so that it is similar to the associations made by the majority of the people the child knows. Still this correction would not be possible without the original association.

The important thing is that the child was able to make an association in the first place. It can then build upon that connection in the future. Each time we experience a word, our association and therefore our understanding of the word is slighty altered and improved. So, what is a meaning? To me it is what is produced by the mind as a result of experiencing a word; and this production of the mind will be unique to each person.

But how do we communicate with each other if we do not all have identical associations? As long as our individual associations are not too dissimilar then language will continue to be productive.