Lab Meeting, Autumn 2015, Week 6

This week in lab meeting I will present some new data from a set of mechanical turk studies about naming. I'll present the analyses I've looked at so far and some preliminary interpretations, but I am mainly hoping to elicit feedback and suggestions both about the design and the analyses. No background reading is necessary. Just be natural. Be calm, thoughtful, receptive and compassionate, but also at the same time firm and relentlessly critical.

Some of the broad questions I am interested in are:

1. What properties of a task cause people to encode visual information into linguistic representations or to adopt a strategy of naming?
2. How does the use of object naming as a strategy unfold across time as people come to understand the demands of the task they are embedded in? Are there individual differences in preference or predisposition for name encoding?
3. How flexible are these types of memory/task-driven name representations? How do people accommodate to tasks or visual contexts in which activating the obvious label for an object will lead to confusability?

The studies I'm presenting are a first attempt at looking at naming in an otherwise nonlinguistic task.

Awe- and Aw-inspiring readings (or just stuff you think deserves a mention)

What we did over last week

Florian

1. Edited paper with Scott Fraundorf on adaptation to dialectal need. Submitted to Journal of Memory and Language.

2. Edited Pajak et al. one final time. To be submitted this week to Language Learning. (it's already accepted)

3. Feedback on Maryam and Kodi's paper on adaptation and storage of adapted expectations across levels of linguistic analysis. The paper is now due for Language and Linguistics Compass but we'll probably need another 1-2 weeks. We also talked about the potential of another paper focusing on inference about social group membership and talker identity directed at sociolinguists. In that paper we would expand Dave's framework to more explicitly reason about such inferences.

4. Feedback on Zach's presentation in spe about his What's in an accent? project.

5. Met with Jane Gatewood (associate provost for global engagement) for post-mortem on CUHK visit. We've also heard back from Helen Meng (computer science, CUHK), confirming her interest in collaborations on language learning, online tutoring systems (they have some really cool ones), and the potential to apply them to speech retraining of patients with strokes that have affected their language abilities. Let me know if you're potentially interested in this project. We're also looking for graduate students interested in visiting Hong Kong to work on this project.

6. Met with Jane Grimshaw (syntax-semantics, Linguistics, Rutgers) to restart our work on the grammar-performance interface in complementizer mention (or from her perspective, the categorical choice between two different syntactic structures driven by nuanced semantics constraints of complement clause-embedding verbs). If anyone is interested in joining this project, let me know. We have two finished recall experiments. Our target audience are linguists.

7. Wrote three more letters of recommendation and contacted relevant folks at UMich, UC Davis, UCSD. Got some enthusiastic encouragement back from some of these places about you MoFos.

8. Finally submitted my promotion files. yay.

Kodi

1. Developed detailed project plan (design notes, hypotheses, reasoning) for a series of experiments investigating adaptation to foreign accented speech and cross-talker generalization. Worked on preparing stimulus materials for this project.

2. Developed detailed project plan for follow up experiments on socially-mediate syntactic alignment. The first step should be rollin' out soon!

3. Met with Maryam, Chigusa and Florian about paper on adaptation and storage of adapted expectations across levels of linguistic analysis.

4. Began revising said paper based on feedback from the group meeting. Still lots to do there.

5. Met with Zach about stimulus materials for subtitle project. I think we have some awesome videos of heavily accented talkers teaching online courses.

6. Met with Dave about several new projects: (i) using supervised and unsupervised distributional learning to assess listeners' expectations about a talker's vowel space; (ii) using a phonetic recalibration task with fricative variation to investigate the process by which listeners induce (or not) talker-independent expectations about variation that is often attributed to talker-specific vocal tract differences; (iii) using dialect corpora to assess within-talker vs. between talker vowel variability (as a measure of listeners' priors about vowels) and then to train a phonetic acquisition model on these data and compare to behavioral data about sensitivity to dialect variation during development.

Andrew

Olga

Esteban

Dave

Sarah

Dan

Amanda

Zach

Linda

1. Finished coding transcription task (Hear sentence; transcribe it)
2. Finished coding freestyle classification task (Hear x speakers; drag and drop to group speakers based on how similar they sound).
3. Finished coding subtitle training task (See transcription before or after audio plays).
4. Met with Logan (grad student in CS) to talk about avatar project and brainstorm experimental ideas. Did some brief literature searching for relevant papers.
5. Worked on my presentation on Hagoort and Van Berkum 2007 for Language class. Gave said presentation.
6. Finally parsed all the eye-tracking data into ms-ms format.
7. Met with Florian and Zach about said data. I have a much better idea of how to start analyzing eye-tracking data now.

Maryam

Wednesday