• LabmeetingSP16w15

Lab Meeting, Spring 2016, Week 15

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

• The paper from Reinisch and Holt on generalization of s-f: Reinisch, E., & Holt, L. L. (2014). Lexically guided phonetic retuning of foreign-accented speech and its generalization. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 40(2), 539–55. doi:10.1037/a0034409. They claim that generalization happens when the talkers are "perceptually similar". reinisch-holt-2014.pdf -DK

• If you're writing javascript for mturk experiments that depends on multiple libraries (or has code split over multiple files), I'd suggest using something like browserify or webpack. This, I now realize, has a few distinct advantages. -DK

  1. It makes dependencies explicit. Instead of putting a bunch of <script src="library.js"> tags in an HTML file somewhere and then calling functions that are included therein, you require('./library.js') in the javascript files that actually depend on library.js (like importing in Python or library in R).

  2. it lets you easily use any library that is available as a node package in your experiment code. e.g. if purrr inspired you want to write everything in a functional style, you can drop in `ramda`. Need a library to parse dates and times? Dropping in `moment.js` is just an npm install --save moment and require('moment') away.

  3. with a minimal amount of extra work (i.e., you have to run browserify to bundle everything up), you can get serious performance enhancement that's not possible by loading individual js files using script tags: the total javascript weight of my experiment went from 300KB to less than 300 bytes (including JQuery and underscore). This is because if you have everything in one big bundle, there are good tools out there that automatically detect which bits your using and which your not, and then compress everything as much as possible. Not that performance is super critical, but still nice to get a 1000-fold reduction in size.

Florian

1. Edited and Submitted Masha's paper to Psych Science. Shudder.

2. Edited paper with Dan for submission to PNAS.

3. Edited abstracts for IWLP (3) and AMLaP (1?). Even wrote one myself .

4. Read and evaluated more post-doc applications. Skype with more candidates.

5. Feedback on paper with Juergen Bohnemeyer and Guillermo.

6. Feedback to Darcy Rose on her plural pronunciation study.

7. Feedback on study design for artificial language learning study by Scott Grimm and Chigusa (on plurality).

Kodi

1. contacted LCN to gauge interest in introductory-style paper on ideal observer and ideal adapter approaches to speech perception

2. prepared and gave cowplot tutorial in lab mtg
3. prepared and gave lecture in Scott Grimm's data science for linguistics class

Andrew

1. Tinkering around the edges of the ALL app to improve its look

2. Started transitioning my SPRRunner Flask app to use Blueprints on the way making it a general MTurk experiment running framework, including adding an RESTful API with anonymization and where others can use the list balancing, etc. (Mostly just in planning at this point.)

3. Cleaned up the Turk Payments Google spreadsheet and generated a report for Florian about how everyone is spending his money.

4. Poked around trying to learn more about RedCap to see if I can reduce the Continuing Review load by improving our setup on it for easier subject count and demographic reports.

Olga

Esteban

1. Went through another batch of annotations from RAs 😤.
2. Did first pass analysis of follow-up to my JML paper with flo'tan. Looks like things are replicating 😌.
3. Worked out some remaining issues with a pygaze study. Turns out something in pygaze/pygame/psychopy/??? does not like 32bit wav files but is ok with 16bit 😶.
4. Met with Jill Warker, had a good chat about ideas for future work 😺.
5. Submitted too many abstracts 😅.
6. Finally did the first round of testing of autoVOT on mturk recordings. Not all that encouraging 😿.

Dave

1. Refactored my experiment code to use browserify for sane dependency management. (See above)
2. Wrote a real simple node back end with list balancing using postgres for data storage.
3. Worked out with Andrew how to deploy experiment on www in these modern times.
4. Submitted an abstract on fMRI adaptation project to the Society for Neurobiology of Language meeting.

Sarah

Dan

Amanda

Zach

1. Spent a long time trying to understand "predict.merMod" in R and why it was bugging out on me.
2. Wrote a more for subtitle project
3. Coded up and demo'd the pupillometry project

Linda

1. More analysis for pen in mouth study.
2. Ran additional experiment for pen in mouth study.
3. Finished adding in mouse tracking to the Tower of Hanoi task. Solicited some helpful feedback from Susan Wagner-Cook.
4. Put together tutorial on LateX for RA meeting.

5. Noam Chomsky in the flesh with da booosh et al.

Maryam

Wednesday

1. Started writing ditransitive definiteness paper. Writing is hard.

2. Prepared & gave purrr tutorial in lab mtg

3. Cleaned up simulation code some more for sharing with others. I feel like at this point I should just make it completely general and stick it on GitHub.

4. Saw Chomsky in the flesh