Timely Snow

One difference in intellectual styles between China and the U.S. is the length of time people will sit in talks. Yesterday I attended a seminar in the lab, where a recent graduate, Li Hong 李鸿 or maybe 李红 gave a talk about the McGurk effect (effects of visual information on perception of sound) and on pinyin (the phonetic writing system used to teach pronunciation of Chinese). I had to leave after 3 hours to go to a dinner date, but she still wasn’t done. It’s a shame the pinyin talk came last, because it was much more interesting to me. Quite a few studies from the big teaching project that Shu Hua, Zhang Houcan, Dick Anderson, and Wenling Li have been doing here have really failed to show any benefit of using pinyin to teach characters. I find that totally surprising (as do they). Li Hong is interested in helping us do another eye-tracking pinyin study when Wu Di comes back here in December, to look at how children are using pinyin when they read, but it’s a very interesting pattern of results so far.

Still, three hours is just too long for a talk. It’s not just me, listening in a second language, who can’t pay attention for so long. People were coming and going, having their own conversations, and sending and receiving instant messages on their cell phones. Luckily, I was near the door, because I could duck outside and catch up with a number of people I needed to see or say hello to as they came and went.

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