Biography:
My name is Carly Danielson- I’m currently in my fourth year at Penn State University, and I’m originally from Pittsburgh, PA. I’m pursuing a double major in Psychology and Linguistics, as well as a minor in Chinese. I currently am monolingual, but have been learning Mandarin Chinese for the past two years, and have greatly enjoyed my time learning a second language. I hope that in the future I can use my passion for language and culture in a meaningful way. I was able to study abroad in Shanghai during the Fall 2018 semester, and it was an undeniably rewarding experience. I am a teaching assistant for a Developmental Psychology introductory course, and actually serve as instructor for a course on analyzing primary literature in the field of Psychology. I plan to attend graduate school and receive a PhD in Clinical or Developmental Psychology. Outside of schoolwork, I enjoy spending time figure skating and playing ukulele.
Project Summary:
I will be traveling to Beijing, China this upcoming summer to conduct research at Beijing Normal University under the advisement of Dr. Taomei Guo. There, I will analyze the influence of speakers’ physical appearance (facial appearance) on listeners’ comprehension of foreign- and native- accented speech, and the language expectations created based upon this physical appearance. Testing this question in students at Beijing Normal University (and comparing their results to American students tested at Penn State) creates the unique opportunity to test how facial information cuing the speaker’s identity influences the comprehension of American- and Chinese-accented English sentences in groups of listeners who differ in their experiences with speakers of these varieties of English. This is a growing field, due in-part to the increasing levels of intercultural communication. This will be tested using two behavioral experiments, one measuring offline transcription accuracy, and one measuring online reaction time (RT) in an error detection task. My study contains four conditions: a Caucasian face followed by either Chinese-accented English or American-accented English sentences and an Asian-face followed by either Chinese-accented English or American-accented English sentences. I am eagerly awaiting this tremendous research opportunity of which I’m very grateful for, and I look forward to seeing what the research reveals!