PhD students Ivy Hauser and Katie Tetzloff are offering first-year undergraduate seminars this semester. Hauser and Tetzloff are both offering courses in the College of Natural Sciences program: Hauser’s “Ok Google: Why Don’t You Understand Me?” and Tetzloff’s “Language, dementia, and modern science”. Hauser is also offering one in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts line-up: “Accents, Dialects, and Attitudes”.The course descriptions are below.

Thank you and congratulations Ivy and Katie!

Accents, Dialects, and Attitudes
What does it mean to have an accent or speak a dialect? In this course, we will examine major dialects of English spoken in the United States and discuss how they relate to geography, age, gender, and race. We will interrogate our own perceptions of who “has an accent” and think critically about the social attitudes surrounding speech. Students will learn how to discover features of their own dialect and conduct informed discussion on dialect variation here at UMass and elsewhere.

Ok Google: Why Don’t You Understand Me?
Most of us have probably had the experience of talking to a phone or computer and being misunderstood. Why does this happen? And how do these technologies actually work? In this course, we will learn the science behind voice recognition technology systems like Siri, Google Now, and Alexa. We will examine sound waves to discover how computers (and humans) get complex meaning out of them. Students will work directly with voice recognition technology and will investigate the sound waves produced by their own voices. We will discuss the strengths of voice recognition technology in its current state and what improvements should be made as the technology continues to develop in the future.

The aging brain: Language, dementia, and modern science

Language is uniquely human and, as such, is essential to our daily lives. But what happens to our language when the structure of our brains is altered? In this seminar we will gain a basic understanding of language through a scientific lens, with a particular focus on its biological and neural basis. Specifically, we will investigate how different neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s Disease and other pathological dementias, cause different changes in our brains, how this is reflected in our ability to use language, and what tools from modern science and technology are promising aids for this problem.