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

Florian

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

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

Dave

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

Sarah

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