What I learned this week in grad school . . .

Some people learn boring things in grad school, and I guess I’ve learned some, too, but here are a few fun things I’ve learned this week:

1. By the time a baby is 12-months-old, their babblings are different based on the language that they hear around them.
2. I learned about the McGurk Effect, where your eyes can trick your ears.  Check out this 3-minute BBC video about it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0
3. We also learned more about sound waves and the way that they are made in your throat and morph by going through your throat and mouth, much like the flames in this 3-minute youtube video we watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpovwbPGEoo&list=PLD35730C757B37A5B&index=19.

(On a random note, here’s an example of another of the uniquenesses that are often found in my life.  One of our example sentences in my Semantics class this afternoon was the following: “The children of Atuler village in Sichuan have for many years been climbing up a sheer 800 meter cliff on rattan ladders in order to attend school” (Kroeger, “Analyzing Meaning”).  We were supposed to describe the coercion effects in the sentence, but instead one of the members of our 5-person group commented on how good the spicy chicken was in Sichuan, which, upon our questioning, we found out was in southwestern China.  And yeah, that’s not super uncommon, either.  Don’t I have a great life?)