Lab Meeting, Spring 2016, Week 12

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

Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1972). Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 11(6), 717-726. - AP, for Zach

Guess the Correlation: the game - kind of addictive little game about guessing the strength of correlations (by looking at a 8-bit-esque graph) - its a side project for a PhD student in bioinformatics at Cambridge. - AP

Wilson, M. P., & Garnsey, S. M. (2009). Making simple sentences hard: Verb bias effects in simple direct object sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 60(3), 368-392.

Florian

1. Edited through Section 3 of Hall et al. for yet another round of revisions.

2. Edited through Nikki Craycraft's paper on cue reliability in syntactic adaptation (twice).

3. Wrote an outline for Thurbull et al on assimilation in conversational speech.

4. Started scheduling summer RA ships and figured out funding situation.

5. Feedback on NCUR poster by HLP lab bubbas Emily Rowe and Larisa Bainton, with generous help from Linda, Zach, and Kodi.

6. Feedback on SVALP talks by Dave and Kodi, which I hear went well (lots of tweets zwitschering about them, too)

7. Review of one grant application, just to recognize that the PI is a post-doc applicant and I had a COI.

8. Post-doc skype interviews (2) - read 39 applications now, including writing samples from a few ...

9. Letter (1 new)

10. Read a bit of course notes on MCMCglmm.

11. Lots of emails for planning of CLS T32 training grant application.

12. Met with data science candidate William Wang, who turned out to have surprisingly many connections to our work. Might be a cool addition to the university.
13. Lived in a freakin' mold castle, while basement repairs caused 'nice fan' effect for the entire house.

Kodi

1. Ran new experiment on socially-mediated syntactic alignment. Manually transcribed and coded sentence productions from ~80 participants, and completed about two-thirds of the planned analyses.
2. Started, finished and presented talk at SVALP based on said data.
3. Drove back and forth from Virginia.

Andrew

1. Worked on getting demographic numbers so we can wrap up the Cross Linguistic continuing review - including partial improvement on duplicate survey reduction in my MTurk counting script. Will finalize numbers with Olga on 4/6.
2. Started on fixing bugs Masha found in new version of ALL app
3. Tried to get MTurk practices meeting scheduled
4. Got Hindi corpus from Raja installed on slate and CS
5. Put the fans I took out of the eye tracker computer back in, because the two replacements were louder and dead, respectively

Olga

1. Updated HLP Post doc candidates
2. Scheduled a skype talk for Laura Morett for the 28th lab meeting time
3. Got the demographic numbers to Andrew for the continuing review

Esteban

1. Continued working on meta-analysis, almost in a state ready to start writing up findings.
2. Created a pre-processing pipeline for eye-tracking data.
3. Re-started working on automatically annotating VOT from some production data.

Dave

1. Finished and presented talk at SVALP: slides and source

Dan

Amanda

1. Put together a mock-up of the new naming study to show Mike the new design. Mike, APS, and I think that we may have found a design that will finally work. This week I have to figure out the filler structure so that we can prepare new recordings and get it off the ground.
2. Ran the various tasks for Val's Experiment 2 on Turk - looking at how the namability of an object, versus the compositionality of its features influences the way listeners think about referring expressions.
3. Set-up the new design for the Frontiers follow-up with Chigusa and Sarah Brown-Schmidt. Looking essentially at whether or not we can see Kraljic-like explaining away for referential expression choices.
4. Worked on my lunch talk, gave a practice version at ESP on Monday, gave the actual talk on Wednesday.
5. Thought about the design of a new study with Mike looking at what expectations people have about the way others will refer to ambiguous objects, and what information they can learn about the world/the speaker by manipulating speaker certainty, speaker reliability, and listener certainty.
6. Started grading exams for BCS259.

Zach

Linda

1. Modified and ran Mimo Experiment. Did some preprocessing of data.
2. A lot of work on the tongue Twister project: Created lists, set up experiment for running. Ran norming for test continuum. Identified point of ambiguity for critical stims. Lots of splicing and tandem-ing to make the productions sound as natural as possible. Ran the norming experiment and will run the main experiment shortly.
3. Contacts RAs with summer RA information.
4. Full test run of eyetracking experiment with RA as subject.

5. Feedback on C&G poster.

6. Some studying for Stats exam.

Maryam

Wednesday

Theme of the week: R 5ever

1. Finally figured out how to appropriately simulate data from mixed effects models with crossed random effects!
2. Prettied up simulation code for a presentation Flo's giving at Michigan
3. Finished putting together R tutorial for RA meeting
4. Wrote filler sentences for new Brown replication effort
5. Studied for stats exam
6. Helped lots of people with statistics and R questions