Lab Meeting, Spring 2015, Week 15

We'll discuss Morton, Sommers, and Lulich (2015). Dave will lead discussion. Please read the paper if at all possible (it's short). Pay special attention to the summary of the talker normalization literature in the intro. It's interesting and relevant to what a lot of us are working on, and provides some insight into how these issues are viewed by most of the hardcore speech perception community.

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

* OpenSesame, an OpenSource Python-based experiment builder under active development, sponsored by SR Research. --Andrew

What we did over last week

Florian

Chigusa

Andrew

1. Helped Masha fix JavaScript for running her MTurk experiments at Penn.

2. Started looking at using JavaScript and the HTML5 Canvas to do a new web self paced reading app instead of continuing with trying to fix and add onto the Flash based one. In the end it should much much lighter and faster, as well as removing an external dependency.

3. Continued work on new webpage.

Olga

1. Went over the continuing review with Andrew and submitted it to Florian to sign off on.
2. Tutorial. Figured out how to link pages.
3. Need to figure out the RA situation and extend a formal invitation to have them work here this summer...

Esteban

1. reviewed an abstract for Scott Seyfarth

2. learned how to hack an ExBuilder script (that I got from Anne Pier)

3. created a small pilot experiment to learn how to use the eye-tracker and figure out what needs to be fixed for the full pilot

4. read the forthcoming Christiansen & Chater (2015) BBS

5. ran a pilot then a full study for the SZ project with Scott Seyfarth

Dave

Sarah

Dan

Amanda

1. Met with Valerie and Teigan to talk about what remains to be done for their Wugland study.
2. Discussed with Olga the plans to try to collect the remaining kids for the BUCLD deadline, and for my MXPrag talk.
3. Ran myself in the Naming Task with the eyetracker, but unfortunately have not had time to go over the data to be certain that it is exporting the data correctly. I still need to double check all of my work to ensure that I haven't somehow made time-related calculation errors. In a previous week I shared a link for scripts that will read the duration times from Praat textGrids, ideally I would like to write some code that then outputs this in the format I need for XBuilder, because I don't trust my excel calculations (human error, etc).
4. Chatted about my pragmatic speaker adaptation stuff in adapatation class - tried to talk about it with respect to how the strength of your priors affects the amount / kind of evidence you need to decide to generalize.
5. Booked my flights to MXPrag - I'll be in Berlin May 28- June 4th, and will be in the Netherlands / Belgium until the 11th. It's my plan to maybe try to meet with Emiel Krahmer (Tilburg) and Hans Westerbeek (Tilburg - works on the role of object knowledge on reference production).

6. Looked over the MXPrag Schedule; it looks like it will be an interesting workshop. I'd like to brush up on some of the details of my MA thesis, and work by Stephanie Solt before hearing the Michael Franke talk.

7. Looked over my CogSci reviews, and divided the tasks into simple vs difficult fixes, and tried to come up with some initial strategies to deal with the more difficult corrections.

8. Re-wrote my grant proposal again (well, at the point of writing this, I'm working on it, but by the time we meet a new draft will be entirely written... hopefully). The proposal is aiming to use an artificial language learning task to look at how people's knowledge about the distributional features of objects influences their expectations about the kinds of referring expressions a speaker might produce, or how it actually influences production. It also asks questions about what role interlocutor knowledge plays in the kinds of expectations people have for production and comprehension. It also opens possibilities for studying how we develop these strategies that allow us to make informative predictions / productions based on shared world knowledge.

9. Read a paper about Russian Children's ability to interpret color adjectives as contrastive (Sekerina & Trueswell, 2012) - summary of findings: kids slow at anticipating referents, best when the preceding discourse makes the contrast salient; processing is speeded up only for trials where a pitch accent was used on the adjective with a nonsplit constituent (apparently in russian you can say split: "red put butterfly" or non-split: "red butterfly put"; for adults the split gives them more time to resolve that the color word was used contrastively, and are seemingly facilitated by a contrastive pitch accent on the adjective).

Zach

Linda

Maryam