Lab Meeting, Spring 2015, Week 12

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

What we did over last week

Florian

1. Read two JML submissions and finished reviews about them.
2. Kodi and his wife visited town and we caught up on plans.
3. Worked on paper with Dan Gildea.
4. Submitted two plenary abstracts for talks in Leipzig and Saarbruecken that are coming up.
5. Read through Tal Linzen's revisions of his paper on entropy and entropy reduction and provided feedback. We are close to resubmitting, but there are some unexpected results to understand (I think there are likely due to a bug in this case).
6. Met with Linda and talked about her very exciting first round of results (web-based experiment on causal reasoning (or lack thereof) during speech perception. We are still battling with ceiling/floor effects (too many people classify the test items always as /s/), but the results now look already very reasonable. We'll give it one more try by looking at slightly shifted test items.
7. Edited through Alex Fine's letter to the editor - a 20 page monster (because of the length of reviewer comments). It was a bit disheartening to see how uninformed some of the reviewers were about the idea that syntactic adaptation might drive syntactic priming effects. This stood out very clearly since some reviewers totally got it and had interesting follow-up questions. But that particular subfield strikes me as rather stuck in old ways of thinking.
8. Provided some preliminary feedback on paper by Liz Karuza on sequential prediction during statistical learning (in an AXB paradigm). It seems other people are getting close to testing similar ideas. At CUNY, there was on poster out of Jenny Culbertson's lab that addressed a very related question.
9. Talked with Scott Fraundorf about the next steps in his needs+participle project. At CUNY we saw that Mike Kaschak now also works on this question again and that his lab is running very similar experiments. I think we have a good idea for the next steps. Happy to talk about it, if there's interest.

Chigusa

Andrew

Olga

1. Started collecting more material for the continuing review (Findings, demographic stuff) Hope to have it submitted within the next two weeks.
2. Waiting for Alex fine before submitting an amendment... Talked to an RA (need to see if she's completed her certification)
3. Wiki work

Esteban

Dave

Sarah

Dan

Amanda

1. Heard back from XPrag, got a 20 minute talk. Confirmed that I'd be attending
2. Gave a guest lecture in Intro to Pragmatics on experimental work in pragmatics. The students apparently thought that the experimental work is interesting. Scott gave me a bit of feedback and asked if I'd be willing to give the same lecture next year.
3. Met with students about their CHILDES homework.
4. Gave a guest lecture on Fedzechkina et al (2012) in Lang Dev, and then hosted a review session for the students.
5. Sent out a lot of announcements to students.
6. Read papers for class.
7. Worried about my grant proposal.

Zach

Linda

Maryam