Yet another SOP!
I'm applying to PhD programs in linguistics. I've had a professor look over this and she says it's fine, but I still get the feeling it's not quite right.
The many ways humans manipulate the sounds that come out of their mouths, the intricacies of language that allow jokes to be made with mere tweaking of words and sentences and meanings - something about these simply tickle my brain. My affection for these phenomena followed me to my undergraduate studies, and this evolved into a fervent desire to discover and learn the processes that facilitate such linguistic acrobatics, especially those involving sound - I became particularly attached to phonetic segments and intonation.
To that end, I wish to pursue a PhD degree in linguistics, focusing on phonetics and language processing. In particular, I am interested in researching the role of prosody in language processing and phonetic and phonological (including prosodic) systems of less-documented languages, though I am also strongly interested in syntactic and semantic processes as they relate to language processing, tonal languages, and general linguistics.
Working part-time in my father's neuroscience laboratory at Medical University as a high-school student instilled in me a fondness for the research environment, but it was not until college when I realized that I truly have a passion for research itself. While taking a class in experimental phonetics, I found myself enjoying the process of brainstorming a question to be answered, designing and running an experiment, and seeing what message I could glean from the resulting data. I fell in love with the scientific procedure, and by the end of class I knew for certain that I wanted to make a career out of research.
I became a research assistant the quarter following my experimental phonetics class, working for a graduate student on a project advised by Dr. Awesome. I was given insight as to the possible links between prosody and semantics, examining the role of prosody in focus constructions and how adjusting the intonation of a phrase could affect how a listener interprets it as grammatical or ungrammatical. As a research assistant, I helped to prepare stimuli and became accustomed to scheduling and running subjects, as well as organizing data; in the process, I also became acquainted with some of the literature on the topic, finding the intersection of the two disciplines so intriguing that I happily printed a fifty-page paper on the role of prosody in focus constructions so I could read it without needing a computer nearby.
During this time, I also took a class on intonation, taught by Dr. Awesome, and delved deeper into the field, culminating in a research project in which I examined the differences in prosody between reading speech and speech from a radio broadcast; this consisted of labeling recordings of both according to Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) and observing the pragmatic reasons for the variations in intonation. I hope to research these topics further, as some aspects of intonation have not yet been widely explored; for example, how prosody affects interpretation of focused syntactic adjuncts as opposed to complements, or expanding the field of prosodic typology.
Another experience I consider valuable to my involvement in research is the undergraduate field methods class taught by Dr. Wonderful, which I took during my third year. We examined Garifuna - an Arawakan language spoken in Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize - and worked with a native speaker, developing skills in field research, sharing our collected data, and analyzing it together. The small size of the class resulted in a close-knit group, and I became accustomed to giving and receiving peer review as well performing group research. Working with a native speaker and contemplating what kinds of data to gather was simultaneously challenging and fun, and I greatly enjoyed the experience. In my research paper for the class, I investigated Garifuna adjectives and adverbs from a morphosyntactic standpoint, covering topics such as the interaction between attributive adjectives and relative clauses and how semantics factors into comparatives and superlatives. Even after the class, I hungered to find out more, and I would like to continue research on these subjects.
However, I am also intrigued by the phonetic and phonological system of this Arawakan language, and when given the opportunity to combine my interest in phonetics and prosody with my interest in Garifuna, I was more than happy to accept. Presently, Dr. Wonderful and I plan to collaborate on a project investigating vowel length in Garifuna. We are beginning by comparing consistently long vowels with those that undergo lengthening by other processes and comparing them to vowels within a stressed environment. From this we plan to move to studying the occurrence of lengthened vowels under certain prosodic conditions, such as location of stress, and whether lengthened vowels may be correlated with constructions involving negation. Eventually, we hope to have a paper written.
[Paragraph specific to university goes here.]
I think I might be going on too much about the past and not explaining what I want to do completely clearly; I really do want to continue studying the topics I talk about, but it feels like just saying "I want to continue research on these topics" isn't good enough. Both of the papers I mention are going to be attached to my application as writing samples, so I'm not sure how much to elaborate upon them here.
Any tips?
The many ways humans manipulate the sounds that come out of their mouths, the intricacies of language that allow jokes to be made with mere tweaking of words and sentences and meanings - something about these simply tickle my brain. My affection for these phenomena followed me to my undergraduate studies, and this evolved into a fervent desire to discover and learn the processes that facilitate such linguistic acrobatics, especially those involving sound - I became particularly attached to phonetic segments and intonation.
To that end, I wish to pursue a PhD degree in linguistics, focusing on phonetics and language processing. In particular, I am interested in researching the role of prosody in language processing and phonetic and phonological (including prosodic) systems of less-documented languages, though I am also strongly interested in syntactic and semantic processes as they relate to language processing, tonal languages, and general linguistics.
Working part-time in my father's neuroscience laboratory at Medical University as a high-school student instilled in me a fondness for the research environment, but it was not until college when I realized that I truly have a passion for research itself. While taking a class in experimental phonetics, I found myself enjoying the process of brainstorming a question to be answered, designing and running an experiment, and seeing what message I could glean from the resulting data. I fell in love with the scientific procedure, and by the end of class I knew for certain that I wanted to make a career out of research.
I became a research assistant the quarter following my experimental phonetics class, working for a graduate student on a project advised by Dr. Awesome. I was given insight as to the possible links between prosody and semantics, examining the role of prosody in focus constructions and how adjusting the intonation of a phrase could affect how a listener interprets it as grammatical or ungrammatical. As a research assistant, I helped to prepare stimuli and became accustomed to scheduling and running subjects, as well as organizing data; in the process, I also became acquainted with some of the literature on the topic, finding the intersection of the two disciplines so intriguing that I happily printed a fifty-page paper on the role of prosody in focus constructions so I could read it without needing a computer nearby.
During this time, I also took a class on intonation, taught by Dr. Awesome, and delved deeper into the field, culminating in a research project in which I examined the differences in prosody between reading speech and speech from a radio broadcast; this consisted of labeling recordings of both according to Mainstream American English Tones and Break Indices (MAE_ToBI) and observing the pragmatic reasons for the variations in intonation. I hope to research these topics further, as some aspects of intonation have not yet been widely explored; for example, how prosody affects interpretation of focused syntactic adjuncts as opposed to complements, or expanding the field of prosodic typology.
Another experience I consider valuable to my involvement in research is the undergraduate field methods class taught by Dr. Wonderful, which I took during my third year. We examined Garifuna - an Arawakan language spoken in Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize - and worked with a native speaker, developing skills in field research, sharing our collected data, and analyzing it together. The small size of the class resulted in a close-knit group, and I became accustomed to giving and receiving peer review as well performing group research. Working with a native speaker and contemplating what kinds of data to gather was simultaneously challenging and fun, and I greatly enjoyed the experience. In my research paper for the class, I investigated Garifuna adjectives and adverbs from a morphosyntactic standpoint, covering topics such as the interaction between attributive adjectives and relative clauses and how semantics factors into comparatives and superlatives. Even after the class, I hungered to find out more, and I would like to continue research on these subjects.
However, I am also intrigued by the phonetic and phonological system of this Arawakan language, and when given the opportunity to combine my interest in phonetics and prosody with my interest in Garifuna, I was more than happy to accept. Presently, Dr. Wonderful and I plan to collaborate on a project investigating vowel length in Garifuna. We are beginning by comparing consistently long vowels with those that undergo lengthening by other processes and comparing them to vowels within a stressed environment. From this we plan to move to studying the occurrence of lengthened vowels under certain prosodic conditions, such as location of stress, and whether lengthened vowels may be correlated with constructions involving negation. Eventually, we hope to have a paper written.
[Paragraph specific to university goes here.]
I think I might be going on too much about the past and not explaining what I want to do completely clearly; I really do want to continue studying the topics I talk about, but it feels like just saying "I want to continue research on these topics" isn't good enough. Both of the papers I mention are going to be attached to my application as writing samples, so I'm not sure how much to elaborate upon them here.
Any tips?