My experience presenting at the 4^{th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of Japan and America was an integral part of my entire research process. After two years of work on our study, which focused on how speaking rate affects how native English Speakers perceive Japanese short and long vowels, we were finally able to present all of our hard work and our conclusions to the scientific community! Although our paper is in for review, this was the first time I could see feedback about our work and respond to it. I also got to meet and talk to many of the researchers whose papers and findings we have read as background knowledge and referred to in our own paper. Many of the names that I knew from my readings of related studies this summer were presenters at this conference and it was very exciting to get introduced to them and hear their talks as a student researcher, because most people only working on campus don’t have contacts like that. I believe that the reason that we devote all this time to research and experimentation is so that we can contribute to the general knowledge of the field of linguistics and phonetics, and at the conference you can see that goal of disseminating your findings happening right where you can see. Also, it’s related to the project because new research for others can point us in the right direction for further work on our own project.}

We presented our study and conclusions in the form of a poster presentation. We were part of a poster session on Speech Communication in Acoustics. The session ran from 8:00 AM-12:00PM on Thursday morning, 11/30. Since our poster was odd-numbered, we had to be there during 8-10 am to explain it and walk people stopping by through our findings. We actually did end up staying at our poster until noon because so many people came by and were interested! In that way, I thought it was a very successful presentation. Liz and I would explain either a very detailed version of our poster or give people a quick overview of results, depending on the amount of time they had. Many people were intrigued by our study and stopped by to ask what we discovered. It was gratifying to see people’s responses, as most accepted our findings and were encouraging to our ideas for future additions to the study. It took a few times to discover the best manner in which to present the information so that it was clear and detailed, although I did a practice run before with Professor Hirata. This helped because in our practice she asked me questions that other scientists might ask me. Once in a while, someone would ask for further clarification or even suggest an alternate explanation than the one we gave. It was a challenge to be able to be ready to respond and sometimes to accept a criticism as valid and one we can learn from. I really enjoyed talking to people and hearing their opinions.

From the act of disseminating our work at the conference, I learned that scientific research is more of a process than something you look forward to completing once and for all. Even one project, when finished, leads to new ideas for further questions to explore. When our project was finished and we presented it here, it didn’t feel like a static and done issue. Instead, we had interactions during the poster session with fellow researchers who had discussions with us about the implications of our research and what would be interesting to search for in the future. Without criticizing it, people would often suggest taking it a step further or tell us connections with their research that we hadn’t considered before. I learned that it is good to make new contacts and connections and draw from the knowledge of others in your field, especially as a student starting out. Also, because my Professor, Yukari Hirata, was organizing a speech session in our area of interest, I got to see a lot of the planning that goes on behind the scenes of a conference like this. One interesting part of this is that the session featured a lot of conflicting opinions on the matter of the Japanese mora, or syllable-like phonetic unit, and it was enlightening to see how people respectfully contradicted each other’s research and gave/ accepted new ideas. I learned how research is spread to others and how it is an ongoing process.

The overall educational value of this presentation was that it was a real taste of what a career in research might be like. I was able to see the end results of our research that was a huge part of my Colgate experience and education in college. This has shown me that, like I have felt all along, I have been participating in a job that actually matters in the scientific community and answers for me a question that I have put a lot of energy and interest in, and also excites people in our field. Instead of seeing how it affects my research team only, I have seen the effect of our research and received feedback and suggestions from the rest of the field and made connections with people who can help me in the future. Also, very important is the fact that my major at Colgate is Japanese, and I was able to see lots of research about the language and how it is best learned by L2 learners and furthermore, talk to Japanese phoneticians in the Japanese language! That was great practice in Japanese and also another option for using my major in the future. No matter how you look at it, the conference has been a great and successful end to our two-year research endeavor!

Overall, I think the presentation went well. At first, it was difficult for me to decide how to structure the presentation: what findings to highlight, how to be succinct without skipping over important information, how much to use the poster. As time went on, I felt more confident. For some people, I would just go through it very quickly and highlight major points, and for others, I would spend more time going over the details of our methodology or findings. Most people had questions, which I sometimes needed help answering. It was really rewarding when Emily and I realized we had been presenting for almost four hours nonstop! We were only supposed to present for two, but people kept coming so we kept presenting. We talked to about 50 people total.

Having to explain our research to other people made me understand it more fully. During the process, I didn’t necessarily think about all the questions that were involved, but when I presented it, I had to think carefully about why we constructed our experiment the way we did. For instance, we used natural speech instead of synthesized speech, which I hadn’t ever considered as an option, but it was question people asked. I also had to look at our work from multiple angles so that I could adjust the way I presented material according to the interest of the people I was presenting to.

Doing the presentations and interacting with the other conference participants made me look at our research differently: I thought about the theoretical background more deeply and I realized how connected our work is to all kinds of other research. For instance, one researcher told me that she works with the acquisition of the Japanese r/l contrast in babies. Her experiment was constructed completely differently, but like ours, her research was looking at the fundamental questions of language acquisition.

What was perhaps most valuable to me about the presentation was experiencing the process of an academic conference. Emily and I were two of only three undergraduates at the conference, so I found out that most people don’t have the opportunity to delve into research like this at the undergraduate level. It was really fascinating for me to hear other people’s stories and find out how cooperative the process is. The conference participants were so passionate about their work, so motivated to ask questions and seek answers, to find out something new and think of new ways to do things. The environment and the process we went through made me think about how things in the world change, how we acquire knowledge and how we solve problems. I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity to have this experience.