Hello Rodrigo! We admire your willingness to share your story on your master thesis within the field of psychology. Shall we start by learning more about your academic background?

During my master’s programme in Applied Psychology at Middlesex University (United Kingdom), I got exposed to the main branches of psychology such as education, clinical psychology, counselling, neuropsychology and many more. We applied the theories and the frameworks of the bachelor’s programme in a more practical way.

Understood! I am happy to know that you already graduated and that you got your master’s degree in applied psychology. During your studies, you had to find a certain topic of interest for your master’s thesis. Could you tell us a bit about the topic?

My thesis was the most challenging thing I have done thus far. It was not easy, because I was working full time as well. When I met my supervisor, I felt very lucky. She was considered to be one of the best researchers in the psychology department of the university. She is more focused on cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and psycholinguistics.

Psycholinguistics you say? Could you explain to our readers what kind of field that enhances?

Psycholinguistics, or also known as the psychology of language, is the study of the psychological and neurobiological aspects that enable humans to learn, use and understand language - both spoken and written forms. How does your brain memorise and learn a language? How does your brain process and store words? How do you develop your lexicon? I did not know about this field until I met my supervisor. It felt like a shot in the dark because I didn’t know anything. However, she inspired me. It is odd to explain, but I felt able to do anything since she is so passionate about the field of psycholinguistics. I told myself, “Okay, let’s take this challenge and try something out of my area of knowledge”. Her main research is focused on the Age of Acquisition (AoA), which is a specific term in psycholinguistics.

Could you elaborate more on AoA?

Of course. The Age of Acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic variable referring to the age at which a word is typically learned. This variable has an effect on the speed of reading words and research has demonstrated that words acquired earlier in life have an advantage over words acquired later in life. For example, the word ‘doll’ is typically associated with words acquired earlier in life while the word ‘dentist’ is generally acquired later on. Due to all her research on this field, she suggested this topic to me. Since her research background has been predominantly conducted in Turkish (as it is her native language) and collaborations with other orthographies like Russian have made it interesting to see and trace commonalities and differences between orthographies (English-Russian, English-Turkish).

After discussing the main ideas about the topic, she mentioned to me that the research in European Portuguese was very little or inexistent regarding the topic. “Why don’t you take advantage of your own language? Study this phenomenon in your own language!”, she said.

And now onto the thesis itself!

Right. From that moment onward, I decided to do my thesis on AoA in European Portuguese. I used both words and pictures to see whether any differences could be found. There are very big debates on this topic. For instance, the English language. The way you pronounce the words in English is rather different from how you write them (orthography). There is a discrepancy between the oral form and the written form. That doesn’t happen in Turkish, the way you write is also the way you say it. Keeping this idea in mind, my goal was to find out whether that happens in European Portuguese as well.

In the Turkish language, my supervisor found that people tend to recall words that they have learned earlier in life very easily and quickly. I used this as the main hypothesis: I wanted to confirm whether this was true or not in European Portuguese. I prepared my experimental tasks comprising a set of stimuli made out of 50 images, and their respective names (words). As humans, we tend to recall pictures easily, because there is more information for our brain to get a hold of. I divided my participants into a group for solely the words and a group for solely the pictures. Lastly, we conducted a statistical analysis to compare both groups and further analyse these results.

What did the results show you?

The results were quite controversial and somewhat unexpected. We found that European Portuguese is placed between English and Turkish, hence being considered an intermediate orthography. As we discussed previously, Turkish has a very clear orthography (the way you speak it is the way you write it). However, English is a very opaque language (the way you speak it is not always the way you write it).

In European Portuguese, despite its clear orthography which is very similar to the Turkish language, there are some exceptions. Our grammatical structure is quite complex. Namely, there are a lot of different sounds and special characters that make all the difference in the way you pronounce certain words. Maybe this explains why Portuguese people are generally very good at learning languages. The richness in sounds, vowels and grammar can definitely act as a beneficial factor. Still, more research needs to be conducted to understand these results more deeply.

We also found that people remembered images much better than words in general. Although these results have shown the presence of an interaction effect and demonstrated that there is some kind of effect, again, more research is needed to fully understand the role of these results in-memory processing.

What about you personally? Would you be interested in going further into the field of psycholinguistics? 

Well, yes, I would like to proceed with this subject, but I am also interested in other topics. This field of psycholinguistics was only introduced to me by my supervisor. I didn’t know about it previously, and hopefully, with my doctorate in clinical psychology I will be able to do something different and be more practical with my academic endeavours.

There are still lots of things to learn, because our brain is still a mystery. We have discovered incredible things and research never stops, there is still a lot of waiting to be uncovered. With this dissertation, I learned a lot of things. I was put under pressure and I was challenged like never before. I have learned things about my own language that I didn’t know before. So I guess it paid off.