Northwood High School Annual Visit to U-Maryland

Students enrolled in psychology classes at Northwood High School will be visiting campus on February 25, 2011 from 10am-noon.

Schedule

Group Pairings

Group 1: EEG in Language Research

Led by: Wing-Yee Chow (Linguistics) and Dave Kush (Linguistics)

Location: MMH 3416A (EEG Lab)

Mind reading

What goes on in your brain when you read or hear a sentence? Understanding language requires a lot of brain power. When neurons fire, they generate electrical activity that we can measure using a technique called electroencephalography (EEG). Scientists have discovered patterns of brain activity that give us clues about what cognitive processes are happening in real-time. In this session, we'll consider how language researchers use EEG to reveal the millisecond-by-millisecond activity that unfolds when people read sentences. You'll get a chance to see real brain waves and learn how to decipher what they mean.

Pre-reading Assignment

Do you know the answer to the following questions? (you can find them on the web, e.g., Wikipedia)

• What is EEG measuring?
• Do we have EEG when we're sleeping?
• Can we know what a person is thinking about when we measure his/her EEG?
• Who uses EEG?
• Is EEG safe?
• Can we measure EEG in babies and non-human animals?

Slides/Other Materials

Group 2: Brain Training

Led by: Erika Hussey (Psychology/NACS), Jeff Chrabaszcz (Psychology/NACS)

Location: BPS1103

Get Your Brain In Shape!

If you've played Big Brain Academy, then you've probably wondered if it actually works. Can doing daily puzzles make you smarter? Recent research suggests that this may actually be the case! By challenging yourself with certain cognitive tasks, you exercise memory systems that make it easier for you to excel in other areas. Something that researchers at Maryland are interested in is how improving memory can make it easier for you to learn a new language or excel in the processing (reading and speaking) of your native language. In this group, we'll discuss a concept known as brain plasticity, and we'll tell you a little about how to train your brain and what this means for language learning and general intelligence.

Pre-reading Assignment

• What is synaptic plasticity?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a 'plastic brain'?
• What do psychologists and linguists mean when they talk about a "critical period"?
• What is the difference between domain-specific and domain-general abilities?
• What is the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence?
• What is working memory? Why might it be important for language?

• For a demo of a brain training task go here

• Cool example of cross-modal plasticity: phantom limb patients

Slides/Other Materials

Brain Training Presentation Slides

Download Dual N-Back Task here

Do Block Span Task Here. For a user name, email ehussey@psyc.umd.edu

Group 3: Kiddy Eye-Tracking

Led by: Tess Wood (Hearing & Speech), Sabrina Panza (Hearing & Speech), Giovanna Morini (Hearing & Speech)

Location: MMH 3416B

TALKING with your EYES!

Our eyes take in a vast amount of information from the environment, but they can also give information out. Where you are looking at any given point in time reveals a lot about what is going on in your mind. By studying eye-movements, language researchers can infer a lot about how people's understanding of language unfolds in real time - without their having to utter a word. This method can be used to study language processing in children and babies, who generally can't tell us what they're thinking.

In this group we will become familiar with eye-tracking techniques that are used to study different aspects of language processing. We will use an eye-tracking machine to show you different kinds of experiments that can be carried out with this tool - and we will show you that your eye movements are not as random as you may think.

Pre-reading Assignment

Take a look at some of these sites to get answers to the questions below.

What are some of the general applications of eye tracking?

• http://blog.eyetools.com/

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_tracking

Why track kids' eyes?

• http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/psychology/31eye.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=eye%20tracking&st=cse

How does eyetracking work anyway?

• http://eyetrackingupdate.com/2010/03/03/introduction-eye-tracking-anatomy-eye

Group 4: Bilingualism in Adults

Led by: Anna Lukyanchenko (Second Language Acquisition), Shannon Barrios (Linguistics), Suzanne Freynik (Second Language Acquisition)

Location: MMH 1108B

One mind, two languages

Did you know that more than half of the world’s population and 17% of the US population is bilingual? Did you know that being bilingual might have an effect on the way we think? How the languages of bilinguals interact can tell us something about how language works in humans more generally. Research on bilingualism aims to address questions such as: Does bilingualism affect cognition? Are both of a bilingual’s languages active at any given time? Do the languages of bilinguals interact? Are there any cost or benefits to being bilingual? The answers to these questions will help language scientists to provide a universal account of human cognition, which can account for language use by both monolinguals and bilinguals. In this session, you will learn that the language(s) that you speak can influence what you see, hear and say. More general cognitive benefits of bilingualism will also be discussed.

Pre-meeting discussion questions

• What does it mean to say someone is bilingual/multilingual?
• How do people become bilingual?
• Do you think that there is a period of our lives when we are better language learners?
• Do you think that it is harder for bilingual children to acquire two languages at once?
• Are there benefits to being bilingual?
• Do you think that a bilinguals’ languages interact? Can you think of any evidence to support your answer?
• Do you think there is an upper limit to the number of languages that a person can learn?
• Do you think being bilingual may change the way we see, hear, or speak?

Slides/Other Materials

bilingualism.pdf

Group 5: Sounds

Led by: Ewan Dunbar and Sol Lago (Linguistics)

Location: MEG Lab & MMH 3416D (Upstairs conference room)

How Does This Sound To You?

People perceive speech effortlessly and use it to communicate, and sounds are the building blocks of speech. But how do we make sense of the sounds we hear in the first place? How do our brains figure out the sounds entering our ears? In this session, we will show you that different people can hear the same sound in completely different ways! We will also show you the kind of brain experiments we do to find out how speech is processed. We will analyze pictures of sounds together and we will relate pictures of the sounds of your own voices to the different types of neurons that are used in the brain to process and understand speech. At the end, we will take you on a tour of our experimental speech lab, where we use MEG (magnetoencephalography).

Pre-assignment

Our tour of the world of the brain will be led by you! For this visit to work, we need your help! Make sure you do these three very important things before coming:

1. Make a recording of yourself on the computer. If you're having trouble (because you don't have a computer, microphone or software to do it), you should get together with other people in the group. If you can't find software to do it, you can download Audacity for free from here.

   • Record yourself saying "My name is (your name). Purple monkey dishwasher!"
   • Save it as an mp3 file (or as a wav file if you have trouble with that). Each person should save their recording in a separate file.

   • Send the file as an email attachment (or as a link to a public folder, for the tech-savvy) to emd@umd.edu .

2. The pictures we will be analyzing are called "spectrograms".
   • Find a definition of "spectrogram" on the web and explain in it your own words.

   • Have a look at this spectrogram from Wikipedia. It is a spectrogram of someone saying "tatata." Can you see where each sound is? You can print this spectrogram and bring it to class - we will work on it.

3. Our lab uses MEG. Write short answers to both of these questions and bring them to class.
   • What is MEG?
   • Why do people use MEG in hospitals?

Slides/Other Materials

Slides (keynote) Slides (pdf)

Group 6: Computational Linguistics

Led by: Yakov Kronrod (Linguistics)

Location: EGR 0135

Computers and the Brain

Have you ever tried to remember a word but it just doesn't come to you? Have you ever been inspired by a painting but couldn't find the words to describe it? The mind has access to as many as 50,000 words. How is it that we can recognize them, use them effectively, and be able to find them in such a large sea? Words are the building blocks to all of language. By studying how the brain uses words we have a window into how the language system works with other cognitive systems such as memory and perception. And computers can use words to classify, describe, search, and associate ideas, pictures, or webpages. We explore how multi-cultural image tagging by people can help museums use computer algorithms for storage and search over art collections.

Pre-reading Assignment

To start, please take a look at the following Wikipedia pages and read the introduction section of each (the part before the Table of Contents)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_linguistics

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing

Then, take a few minutes to tag some images at an online museum:

1. go to http://tagger.steve.museum/ and log in with

   • username: northwoodpsych
   • password: Northwood2011
2. Click on any picture to start tagging
   • once picture appears you can enter relevant terms for the image in the "Tag Me" section to the right of the image
   • you can then move between images with the Next/Previous image links to the left of the current image
   • feel free to explore the site
   • write up a paragraph of what you think of this interface and what possible applications doing this could have
3. If you are bilingual, feel free to create your own Steve.Museum user name (on the main page before you log in) so that you can set your language preference to a different language.

Slides/Other Materials

Group 7: Infant Lab

Led by: Aaron White (Linguistics)

Location: TLF 1104

Baby Talk

Ever try to learn another language? Wouldn’t it be even harder if you didn’t know anything about language, like a baby trying to learn a first language? Maybe not. Infants solve the problem of learning their native language in a mere 4 years or so without the benefit of another language to work off of or a teacher to guide them. A baby hears a continuous stream of sound and must figure out where the words are, what they mean, and how they combine into sentences. As scientists, we want to know how they do this, but we obviously can’t ask them directly. Through a variety of hands-on activities and demonstrations, we will explore cutting edge techniques for discovering what babies know about language and how they learn it.

Pre-reading Assignment

There are a number of questions one might ask about an infant's cognitive development; for example:

• Can infants distinguish between two sets of stimuli?
• Which of two stimuli do infants prefer?
• Can infants understand a spoken stimulus?

The assigned reading below introduces some experimental techniques used to study infants as well as a timeline of infants general development. After reading it, try to determine which experimental procedures could be used to answer each of the questions above for 1 month-old, 6 month-old, and 12 month-old infants.

infantlab.pdf

Slides/Other Materials

Group 8: Language Disorders

Led by: Shevaun Lewis (Linguistics), Josh Riley (Linguistics)

Location: CHM 1224

When things go wrong

Since language is a system in the brain, it is often broken when the brain is damaged or develops abnormally. How language breaks down can tell us something about how language works in healthy people, as well as how to help patients. Since language is very complex, there is a huge variety of disorders that can break it in different ways. In this group, you will learn what scientists know about how the language system is organized in the brain. You’ll also get to try to “diagnose” some patients with language disorders by listening to clips of their speech.

Thought questions

Worksheet with thought questions to complete ahead of time: language_disorders-worksheet.pdf

Slides/Other Materials

Group 9: Eye-Tracking for Reading

Led by: Susan Teubner-Rhodes (Psychology/NACS)

Location: MMH 1413G (Lunchroom) & MMH 1413C (Eyetracking Room)

Eyes: Windows to the Mind

If you're watching the clock during class, are you thinking about what your teacher is saying, or when class will be over? Although we perceive the environment as a connected whole, we can actually only look at one little piece at a time. Our eyes are constantly moving, collecting information to build a complete picture of the world. Eye movements aren't random: they're directed by our thoughts and expectations. So if you're looking at that clock, it's a good bet that you're thinking about when class will be over. At UMD, we have eyetracking machines that allow us to see what a person is looking at from millisecond to millisecond. And, language scientists use information about eye movements to figure out how people understand sentences. In this workgroup, we will explore eye-movements during reading and during listening in order to tap into the thought processes that allow us to understand sentences so effortlessly.

Pre-reading Assignment

Visual Processing and Eye Tracking

Please visit these web pages to answer the following questions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_tracking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_in_language_reading

• What is a saccade?
• What is the "Strong Eye-Mind Hypothesis"?
• True or False: Visual attention is always slightly ahead of the eye?
• How long does it take to prepare a saccade towards a new goal?
• What fields of research make use of eye tracking techniques?
• How is gaze location determined using an eye tracker?

Language Tasks and Eye Tracking

Read the paragraph below and answer the questions that follow.

Homonyms are words that have multiple meanings, even though they are spelled the same. For example, the word 'ball' could refer to a spherical object that is thrown or kicked in sports, or to a formal event with dancing. When we read, how do we know which meaning to extract upon encountering a homonym? Our selection of the appropriate meaning is influenced by several factors, including word frequency and semantic context. Word frequency refers to how often the reader sees the word in writing; the reader is more likely to select the meaning that occurs more frequently. Semantic context refers to the meaning of the words surrounding the homonym; the reader is more likely to select the meaning that fits the context. Word frequency and context sometimes point to different meanings. In the above example, the sports-related meaning is more frequent than the dance-related meaning. However, in some sentences, the dance-related meaning will be the correct option based on the context. In the following example, the relevant context appears after the homonym, but suggests the less frequent meaning: She kicked-off the ball at eight o'clock with a toast to the charity foundation. Using eye tracking, we can determine what the eyes do when frequency and context conflict with each other.

• What are some other factors that might influence the selection of meaning? Why?
• What do you think the eyes do when they see an ambiguous word?
• What are some homonyms you know? See if you can use them to write a sentence that 'tricks' the reader by supporting the less frequent meaning.

Slides/Other Materials

EyeSlides2010.ppt

Group 10: Developmental Bilingualism

Led by: Candise Lin (Human Development)

Location: BPS 1236

The Little Interpreter

In a Chinese-English bilingual household, this is what typically happens: Mom says “baby, this is a cup” and dad says “孩子，这是一个杯子” (in English: baby, this is a cup). Then mom and dad continue to speak in their native languages. You may wonder, wouldn’t the baby get confused and mixed up the two languages that he/she hears? Wouldn’t the baby experience language delay because Chinese and English are so different and there’s a lot of information to figure out? The answer to these questions is NO! Bilingual babies are on par with their momolingual peers in many aspects of language development, no matter how similar or different the two languages are. In this workshop, you will learn about how bilingual babies figure out the sounds and words in their two languages. We will also talk about how bilingual children learn to read two different writing systems (imagine reading this paragraph and the Chinese sentence above). You will listen to sounds and play games from different languages and get to experience the life of the little interpreter!

Pre-reading Assignment

LittleInterpreterReading.docx

Slides/Other Materials

Group 11: American Sign Language and Visual Language Processing

Lead by: So-One Hwang (Linguistics), Clifton Langdon, Melissa Malzkuhn

Location: MMH 1400

Feeding the Brain through the Eyes

Kids are born with the hunger for language input. For babies who are born deaf or hard-of-hearing, the most accessible form of language input is visual, which comes from signing. Hearing kids who are born to deaf parents pick up a sign language first because that is what they are exposed to at a very young age. Our brains are wired to recognize language, whether it is spoken or signed! Sign languages, including American Sign Language (ASL), have rich grammars and convey complex meanings like all spoken languages - and provide a fascinating way to communicate and learn. On your visit, you will be given a unique presentation both in English and ASL. We will show you how research is helping us figure out what are the similarities and the differences between spoken and signed languages. An exciting part of this research is its potential to improve education as we figure out how learning happens through the eyes.

Pre-reading Assignment

Fingerspelling.pdf

Please read Baker's Research Brief on Fingerspelling. Moreover, browse through the pages on the following website:http://vl2.gallaudet.edu .(Note: University of Maryland collaborates with Gallaudet University to study language. Our presentation will be given by members of the Maryland and Gallaudet communities.)

You may also enjoy watching the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV69iJuXwP4

Please think about your answers to these questions:

- Have you ever seen people communicating in ASL before?

- If you had to guess, what do you think are the four most popular second/foreign languages that students study in school?

- What is the difference between signing and fingerspelling?

- Imagine that you heard and spoke in English - but that the English alphabet didn't exist and you could only read and write in Chinese (using Chinese characters and Chinese grammar). What do you think would be the consequences for your ability to learn?

- Why is diversity important for science?

Previous Outreach Events

Northwood Visit 2010

Northwood Visit 2009