Still alive...

Yes indeed, here I am, after so many months of silence. What can I say... I am on my junior sabbatical. In any case, lots of exciting linguistics is getting done. A paper on Hebrew and Maltese psycholinguistics (focusing on - what else? - lexical access!) is in the works (to be submitted in the next month or so), and preparations for an additional experiment, this time on Hebrew morphological family size effects in spoken word recognition, are underway. I'm quickly learning that designing good experiments takes a lot of time, not to mention money - so a grant application for that is underway. Luckily I have colleagues abroad willing to run the experiment in their lab (don't panic, they'll be approved by our Human Subjects office first), which saves me the expense and anxiety of a trip to Jerusalem right now.

In neighborhood news, nothing out of the ordinary to report; various new residential buildings are going up, which is exciting, except for the ones where the builders have clearly ignored the plans approved by our historic zone advisory board. I'm hardly a fascist about such things, but I have to say, we're a pretty understanding board, and when someone blatantly does something we've told them is incompatible with the character of our neighborhood...well, even I get upset. You should see the reaction of some of the other people on the board! Downtown seems depressingly slow, aside from projects being spear-headed by private developers, such as the Rialto block. But downtown remains a vibrant and unique place nonetheless.