As an undergraduate research assistant in the Pitt Linguistics lab, I worked with a faculty adviser and a team of other graduate and undergraduate researchers. We were studying the effect background noise has on Accented Speech Perception. We compared monolingual English speakers with bilingual Spanish and English speakers on their ability to discern words in different accents and in varying levels of background noise.
I was only involved in this project for a semester, so at the end of the semester we presented our preliminary findings and the process we took to get them in front of a linguistics colloquium.
The experience working first-hand on linguistic research really helped me contextualize the research process in a social science field. I saw first-hand the problems researchers are often confronted with, such finding participants, resolving errors with technological equipment, and coordinating a group of people towards a common goal.
