First post from Malta!

This is my first blog post from Malta, and because we haven't seriously started to work hard yet on the experiments, we're in a very relaxed state, and savoring it. Work-wise, we'll be moving into the item selection phase of our two priming experiments as soon as we have some item judgments from a native speaker of Maltese. Also, we anticipate that item selection for Maltese will go more smoothly than for Hebrew because Andy's going to write a perl script, or a set of perl scripts, that will be able to automate the prime-target pairing process. That phase usually takes a lot of time when done manually, and is pretty painstaking because it's crucial to never recycle a root or word in order to avoid an accidental repetition priming effect. The automated version will be able to do the same work in a lot less time. Another reason this part will go easier is that Scott Jackson - Praat genius extraordinnaire - has written several scripts that will make our file-extraction and file-renaming phases go much more smoothly.

We've been in Malta three days now, and have had an amazing time so far. Our apartment is fantastic; three bedrooms, and humungous. It's got a hall you could rollerskate down that's about 40 feet long, and a truly enormous kitchen. We're about a block away from the Mediterranean Sea, in Sliema, which unfortunately is being unsustainably overdeveloped before our very eyes. We had an incredible time Saturday night in Zebbug when Ray, Anna, and Noah had us over along with a lot of their friends for a holiday party, and yesterday spent some time walking along the sea front. The weather is delightful. Whereas Jerusalem was cold and dry, followed by cold and wet, Malta is cool and wet. The temperature ranges from a low of about 50 to a high of about 60, and despite some heavy rain it's really been nice to be outside.

Tomorrow, we'll walk around Valletta a bit, and then probably start getting down to business experiment-wise.