This is the Wug Test:
It proves that children instinctively pick up some aspects of morphology, like adding -s to words to pluralize them. The children given the test would always answer "wugs" even though "wug" is not a familiar word that they would ever have heard pluralized (i.e., they couldn't have learned the plural by rote, so they must be applying universal rules). This is not related to my life, I just think the wugs are adorable. There was also another image of a "little wug" (trying to prompt the word "wuglet", which neither children nor adults produced consistently) that was even more adorable, but I can't seem to find it anywhere online. (Any help is appreciated, because I really want to have the image. It is just that cute.)
Finally, there is this, which is exactly how my seventh-grade math teacher talked. Not relevant to Carleton exactly, but in case you wanted a bit of insight into my background, there it is. I'm doing a study of students' perceptions of American dialects for my linguistics paper using speech samples from that website (it's a great site, by the way; it has samples of people from all over the world reading that same paragraph, which is supposed to have most of the sounds in the English language), so I might use that one for the Boston accent.
In other news, how is it the end of sixth week already? This term has gone by the fastest of any term I've been here, and at the end of it I will be halfway done with college. (Hopefully. If I don't take the dreaded victory lap. Shudder. (I'm not worried about that, just to clarify. I just think the term "victory lap" is funny.))