Bonfire Night

I'm wondering why I wrote that last post-- I'm keeping it up cos I've decided not to delete anything I write here. I always get rid of things and regret it afterwards (some of my DBZ paraphernalia, as laughable as that sounds, as well as my livejournal account, to name a couple). Anyway, my dreams are always vivid and random, but I seem to be going through a heck of a lot more of them nowadays-- I wonder if that means I've got a lot on my mind? I don't feel overwhelmed or anything, and I'm always well-rested, so maybe all the dreaming is a good thing-- I look forward to sleeping, at any rate.

Last night my dreams were full of randomness-- my dad was building a house all by himself, which was turning out to be a nightmare-- I was a spy and I had to swim through a dark marina to steal a sea-doo-- I was weaving in my old car through a parking lot and grazed a bumper in my haste to turn around, and decided to drive away instead of doing anything about it... You'd think my dreams would be of England or university or something relevant to my experiences here, but my brain decided that was too logical for me!

All through the daytime yesterday I was running data analysis for my reading study. I finally finished running it on Friday and I was excited to see the results. As you know, I had given students garbled passages to read last week, which were actually transcripts of audio from a patient with a language disorder. This week I gave students the normal passages. When I ran the tests on the data, I found (not unexpectedly) that they scored significantly worse in answering questions on the garbled passages than the normal passages. I also found (to my disappointment) that the patient scored pretty similarly to the garbled-passage condition, which just goes to show that nothing too interesting was going on in her head that I couldn't have gathered from her transcripts. What I mean to say is, she said exactly what she could understand, and answered the questions comparatively. I had hoped that she would score closer to the control condition, which would have meant she was comprehending more than she was generating, which would have been a really cool effect.

I've been looking for some theoretical support for my study, and found that there is a lot of debate among language scientists about how we process the written word. When we read, do we draw out the sound of the word first and access the meaning, after? Or, can we access the meaning of a word without the pronunciation of it in our heads? Several studies have found conflicting results. Mine, I guess, seems to show that meanings of words are accessed better if the phonological representation (pronunciation of the word) is accurate.

My study might still be useful, though. One previous study argued that their patient with aphasia was still able to understand meanings of words even though he could not pronounce those words. But, what the researchers didn't do, was compare their patient to controls... when my patient took the comprehension test, she scored about 70%, which seems like fair comprehension, considering she scored better than chance. However, when my controls were given the jumbled words (and those words could provide no semantic access to real words, unlike the words given to my patient), they scored almost the same. So that just goes to show that my test was probably too easy and people can guess the correct answers even if they were given nonsense to read, and it looks like phonological reps are quite important to the meanings of words... so I'm going to write up these issues and findings as a scientific poster and hopefully present it this spring at the BPS conference in London.

Okay, so I titled this post Bonfire Night for a reason, and that is because the 5th of November is a holiday here not unlike our 4th of July in practice. Here's a history lesson, Yanks-- on November 5th, sometime in the 1600s, a group of conspirators plotted to blow up the House of Lords, similar to today's Parliament, to bring down the Protestants and bring back Catholicism to the rulers of England. Guy Fawkes was in charge of guarding the explosives that had been strategically placed for their act of terrorism, but authorites caught him before he could do any damage, and he was maimed and tortured and had a public hanging and all that horrible stuff. Ever since, England has celebrated its amazing luck with fireworks, bonfires and barbeques every 5th of November.

This year it rained. Which sucked, because Jana and I didn't actually go see any fireworks on November 5th, but there was a big party in Abbey Park the day after with plenty of fire and sparks to make up for it, cos we went there-- and here's the story:

Around 5:45-ish, it was getting dark and chilly, and Jana, Tom (her roommate), and I made our way down to Abbey Park. We met a couple of Tom's friends on New Walk along the way, one of them another American who had this double-air about him of 1)amused bewilderment at anything English and 2)slight disdain for Leicester and superiority for naturally being an American. However, this attitude might have spurned from his being from New York, more than anything. The other Brit seemed to be as casual as Tom, which is probably why they're friends.

We hit the park and first thing we saw was a huge pile of wood, all stacked neatly into a boxy shape, and surrounded on all sides by a barrier. Just in front of the pile was a tall metal frame stamped with the visage of none other than Guy Fawkes himself, pointy 17th century-esque hat and all. There was a big TV screen right above a stage that everyone was crowding around, where BBC Leicester radio DJs hosted, and entertainers performed.

The first thing we did, of course, was run to the food stands-- Jana, Tom and I got some great crepes-- not your typical, teeny weeny, limp, thin, crepes-- but massive, thick, crispy pancakes that were each spread over its own round grill, batter dumped from enormous buckets, and filled with lots of goodies. Jana had hers filled with strawberries and cream, mine was filled with cheese, but you could get it loaded with fruit, or meat, or a combination of fruit and liqueur (as a side note, I finally bothered to look up the real spelling of liqueur).

We made our way across the field to watch the lighting of the biggest bonfire I'd ever seen. The barriers were a good long ways away from the fire itself, but the heat coming from the flames was enough to make us finally turn our back to shield our scorching faces... we warmed up very nicely for a good half hour, before the fire died down and what was once a heaping pile of wood was reduced to ashes. Jana proposed the idea to hop the fence and do a "fire walk", but none were stupid enough. As we made our way back across the field for the fireworks, a streaker bounded across an empty plain that had been blocked off for the display, and I missed him, unfortunately, and only saw the aftermath of three cops charging after him behind a building. But Tom and his friends saw the guy, and that turned out to be better fun than all the entertainers of the night, who were quite mediocre for a 10,000-man crowd. I mentioned to Jana, of course, that Stefani could have done this place well.

The fireworks were very pretty, but the show was much too short. Really, the bonfire and crepe made the night spectacular. The boys decided to hit the pub before going home, but I went back to my place to read some Harry Potter-- which is like a whole new book when you read the British-English version. Here's a new word for all of you: scarper. It means basically the same thing as scamper although it suggests more of the "hurrying quickly away" quality of the word and less of the "panicked or mindless running" quality. Here's another term I learned from Harry Potter: "Get out of it". This phrase basically means "Go away" but in a less-direct sort of manner.

So next time your annoying little brother/sister/cat intrudes on you, you can say in a severe tone, "Get out of it," and watch them scarper.