You are Hear

The Lineage of You

Anyone who’s ever worked on research with a mentor or professor will ultimately sit through (many times!) your mentor/professor going off on a tangent that involves something I’ve termed “the lineage of you.” It’s the answer to the question “Mommy, where do PhDs come from?” You’ll ask your mentor how a conference that they attended was, or even just talk about the research you’d like to do, and they start talking like this:

“Oh, yes, it was a great conference. You know I got to see Soandso, do you know Soandso? Well, Soandso was a doctoral student studying verycriticaltheory with Prof.NameI’veonlyseenonbooks at big state university when I was doing my doctoral work at suchandsuch university. I met them through Whatshername, who was in my cohort at suchandsuch university, when we did a study together on…”

At first, it sounds like a large game of scientific six-degrees of separation. But the more you listen to it, the more it becomes family story-time between you and your mentor. Your mentor will, in a sense, “beget” you as a researcher and s/he wants you to know your academic stock, where you came from, your academic family tree. This talk is also a lovely way to remind you that these are the people you will, in a way, honor and uphold with your research (but no pressure! these people are only the biggest names in your area of interest! ha ha ha).

There’s also this idea that you too will one day do your own research and “beget” your own researchers who will hold up your standards as well as the standards of your academic lineage.

Nothing like story time…

Also, blog friends, I totally lied to you last week and completely forgot to post. I’m working on the abstract for the conference on CI users. Last week, I had to rewrite a paper I did not do so well on. AND, next week is the last week of the semester, so finals are here. But then, I have a month off…and by a month off, I mean a month to read journal articles, for my own interests (!), in peace!

Yes, Nerd-dom is a wonderful place.

Holy Thanksgiving Break, Batman!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. It has been a whirlwind week for me, and I have not even had a moment to post. I finally met with my adviser on Monday about starting my Level 1 project (PhD degrees are typically done in levels. For my school, Level 1 is a literature review, Level 2 is a small research study, Level 3 is your dissertation. Yes…if you do it right, one can lead to the other, so I’m hoping I’ve got it right for my Level 1 project).

And the CI lab is also collecting a ton of language samples that need analysis…I came up with an idea on something to explore in them and my adviser wants to write it up as an abstract for a conference. The abstract is due in 2 WEEKS! …I’m on it!

Language Samples are an interesting controversy in our field. I know a lot of people think they are useless or tedious, and do not yield as much quantitative information or bang for your buck as standardized assessments. Then there’s a whole group of people who believe language samples are one of the only true assessments of natural language performance. Many of the major players in our field’s research founded their careers on massive amounts of language sampling (e.g. Bloom, Lahey, Brown), and their findings really changed how we evaluate and treat child language. 

I believe in a little of both, but I’m not sure if collecting language samples for every kiddo is really practical in, say, a public school, where you have 50-something kids on your caseload.

What role does language sampling play in your clinical life? Do any of you have experience analyzing language samples? Outside of SALT analysis? What do you look for in your language samples?