Lab Meeting, Spring 2015, Week 14

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

What we did over last week

Florian

  1. Prepared talk for plenary at "Causality in the Language Science".

  2. Revised design for the next need + participle study together with Scott F. We're trying to figure out what exactly is being learned when one sees a new unexpected structure. There are some links to Maryam's work, too, that we should chat about.
  3. Continued working on paper with Dan Gildea about the processing efficiency of natural languages. A first draft is available upon request.
  4. Tweeted a bit about nice papers I've read.

  5. Watched Percy Liang's talk in a train to Leipzig. Pretty neat!
  6. Met with an undergraduate who is potentially interested in building on Nikki Craycraft's work on syntactic adaptation.
  7. Met with Maryam and Chigusa to talk about her planned Linguistic and Language Compass article.

  8. Received an invitation to edit a special issue on phonological planning in Frontiers because of the awesome impact HLP lab articles had in Frontiers (apparently we are 96th percentile in terms of impact! Keep it up). Inclined to decline, unless one of you is interested in doing this and taking the lead?. Might be able to negotiate a free Frontiers article out of it.

Chigusa

Andrew

  1. Found more HITs to include in the counts / demographic reports for various reports
  2. Further cleanup of my demographic parsing script, because I found some nasty bugs
  3. Ditched the RSS feed widget I was using on the new webpage and wrote my own using the Google Feed API to get the feed as JSON.

  4. More work on the new webpage in general. Check out the draft version at https://www.hlp.rochester.edu/2015refresh/ If you have a good background picture to replace the neuron pic I grabbed from Google Image Search, then let me know.

  5. Helped Chelsea fix the eyetracker set up in 415 so that Matlab, Eyelink, PyGaze, etc. experiments as well as ExBuilder can talk to the tracker host PC.

  6. Created a Lab YouTube channel and uploaded the videos from our old webpage there instead of self hosting for the new webpage.

Olga

  1. Filled out the demographic data and the findings for the review (Please send me anything that you have published this year under cross-linguistic)
  2. Organized the demographic forms
  3. Tutorial
  4. Met with Florian about grad schools

Esteban

Dave

  1. Shot down the results I presented in lab meeting last week. They're entirely due to the collinearity in the design matrix (from the overlapping BOLD signals from nearby trials and fixed trial order across subjects). Moreover, the collinearity is a lot worse than I suspected (66% of trials' Beta values are correlated with another trial's Beta at >0.3).

  2. Did some reading on whether or not talker familiarity makes it easier to switch out talker-specific representations. The literature looks like the consensus answer is no. This suggests to me that the story is a little more complicated than I thought when writing the "ideal adapter" paper.

  3. Speaking of which: it's out!

  4. Analyzed results of an additional condition in the shifted VOT distribution experiments I presented about a few weeks ago, where the mean /b/ VOT was -10ms and the mean /p/ was 30. I thought learning would be better in this condition than in the 20/60 condition, but it's surprisingly close. Or maybe no so surprisingly given that 30ms is very low for a mean /p/ VOT...
  5. Cleaned up my MTurk results files from the very earliest experiment I ran so Andrew can more easily access the results.

1. (Dave, Last week)

  1. Analyzed VOT fMRI data presented in lab meeting.
  2. Gave a "big picture" talk in the CS department.
  3. Ran an additional condition in teh VOT shift experiment (see above).
  4. Hacked together a one-time qualification granting and HIT running script in Python because the MTurk Java command line tools have been silently nerfed and don't accept the "DoesNotExist" qualification comparator that's necessary to exclude people who have a qualification.

Sarah

  1. Finished and submitted NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship application with Sarah Creel and Marta Kutas at UCSD.
  2. worked with Chelsea (and Andrew) to finally solve the issue with Matlab connecting to the Eyelink.
  3. Met with Jill Thorson to discuss prosody acquisition.

Dan

Amanda

  1. Finished setting up the naming study - even tested the eye-tracking version on myself. The next step is to carefully look over all of the set-up to ensure that everything was set up correctly before beginning to pilot test lab friends ;)

  2. Started prepping my quals reading list with Chigusa. We discussed the breakdown of my reading topics, and I collected some people's final reading lists to try to figure out what kinds of things I might want to include.
  3. Did some reading for my grant proposal. Most notably read Magnuson, Tanenhaus, Aslin, & Dahan (2003) while thinking about the design of an artificial lexicon task that will help us study how people learn to integrate world knowledge, and speaker reliability / interlocutor certainty to figure out an intended referent, or in producing referring expressions.

Zach

Linda

  1. Finished coding Kamide replication with Zach. All goes well, we'll just have to update the stimuli lists and we'll be ready to run subjects, yay. PyGaze turns out to be pretty easy to work with.

  2. Put Maryam's S-SH norming study up. We tried to test on the most ambiguous region + surrounding (including what we thought was a non-ambiguous step), but it seems that everything tends to be S-skewed in general. As in, even the most-SH sounding step (that we thought was clearly SH) was only marked as SH half the time. I'm curious what the curve would look like over the next few continuum steps towards SH (my last run of the pen study seemed to suggest there might be a larger flat region around 50% than I had thought)...
  3. Started listening to / checking the annotated sound files the RAs have been working on for the above. They're doing a very good job so far!
  4. Read some articles on vision (e.g. Hubel & Wiesel cat studies) to prep for the vision lecture I'm giving in a week. Also read Olshausen and Field's 1996 paper on sparse coding, and am working out how to explain it without triggering the class's math anxiety.

  5. Set up a meeting time with Natalie, a potential future RA who is a double BCS/ASL major interested in doing research with sign language.
  6. Graded assignments for Steve's class.

Maryam

LabmeetingSP15w14 (last edited 2015-04-13 18:41:52 by dhcp-10-5-9-166)

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