I hope someone could offer some advice to my statement of purpose posted below. I could always find something to add everytime I read it. I need someone to help me out~~~
As a language learner and an English major, I am impressed by the power of language with its capacity to connect isolated individuals. My undergraduate courses of Chinese-English translation and interpretation offered me great opportunities to explore this facet of language from a practical perspective, but my desire to probe human languages further so as to understand the nature of human language ability informs me that theoretical knowledge and understanding about linguistics are indispensible. I wish to study linguistics from its interplay with psychology, because psycholinguistics rightfully points out a way to resolve how human beings are able to acquire and understand language. I believe the graduate program in the Ohio State University, with a dynamic linguistic environment, is an ideal platform to fulfill my dream.
My interest in linguistics has been gradually developed through my undergraduate studies. When I tried to find an English equivalent for a Chinese word or expression, I ended up finding the absence of this relationship. When I picked up Arabic as my second foreign language, I was stunned to learn that the base of an Arabic verb is its third person singular form rather than first person. I became eager to know how, with so many differences, language could represent the world equally well. During the 2011 Johns Hopkins ESL summer program, I encountered a faculty member from the cognitive science department who taught me the Accent Reduction class. It was her lectures on English pronunciation and English phonetics that broadened my view about linguistics; hence I began to regard linguistics as part of cognitive science.
Ever since this interest has been formed, I became eager to develop my ability in doing academic research. This ability has been greatly improved during my preparation for the presentation in the Cross-Culture Studies: Fourth Annual Research Presentation. The conference held in Fu Jen University, Taiwan, is a platform for students to conduct original research in social sciences and humanities. I conducted my first linguistic study, A Cross-cultural Study of the "Taste" Terms between Mandarin Chinese and English, and presented it in the conference. I chose this topic because I noticed English bears larger vocabulary in expressing human sensation of taste, and hoped to give some scientific accounts on this issue. In this study, I created a context in which respondents were asked to describe the taste of specific foods, as a way to collect the expressions used by native speakers of the two languages concerned. Through trial and error, and also reference to other relating data, I found that the term "sweet" encompasses only perceptible differences between the two languages while other basic taste terms appear to be almost the same. This experience taught me that logic and comprehensiveness combined determine the potential of a research project, and the findings may not always be as expected.
My internship at the director's office of our department offers me another opportunity to train this ability by participating in the Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) project. This project aims at collecting language data to construct the corpus for the Yaxin translation system in our department. I am currently working with the director by collecting and grouping language data for the corpus. This engagement not only enriches my research experience, but also teaches me to be more cooperative once involved a research project.
The above mentioned experiences highlight an urgent need for me, deciding to work on the advancement of the understanding of human language, to be armed with profound linguistic training. My undergraduate courses of translation and interpretation have left me with three fundamental questions. What are the psychological bases for a native speaker to understand his or her own language? What are the mechanisms for people to process language input in their mind? How does people's syntactic knowledge about their first language affect their language comprehension and learning of another language? The graduate program at the Ohio State University, with its clear mission and strength in psycholinguistics, offers me a good chance to reveal the answers. Your program has an active academic environment for graduate students. The discussion group, Synners, is a wonderful place to share and exchange brilliant thoughts with fellow students, especially for those interested in syntax. The research labs in your department provide rich opportunities for graduate students join in cutting-edge projects. You also have a close relationship with psychology department, which is very impressive and vital to the study of psycholinguistics. Besides, the investigations done by Professor Culicover are very enlightening. His article Same-except: A domain-general cognitive relation and how language expresses it sheds on me new ideas about language and human cognition, triggering my thoughts about how linguistic expressions of domain-general relationship are mapped into our mental space. I am eager to join your program, hoping my work in the area could make some contributions to the understanding of the psychological basis of human language ability.
To broaden my view about linguistics and get myself connected to the most up-to-date information, I joined the Language Society of America (LSA). When I received an invitation email to submit an abstract to the 2013 annual meeting, I was projecting in my mind the day when my research could contribute to the magnificent academic study of linguistics. And as I submit my application to your institution, I luckily set a foot on my journey.
