Malta musings

So this is the week when we all come down with something in Malta. Hopefully, though, it won't stop our progress. We've got a lot going on work-wise, though, and it's good. Thanks to Andy's amazing programming skills, item selection for the Maltese experiments is going much more easily than it did for Hebrew. We're not finished yet with item selection, but Andy is writing a perl program that can create prime-target pairs for all of the relevant experimental conditions. To me, this seems miraculous, and is also a wake-up call that I need to become proficient in this type of programming. It's a challenging program to write, apparently, because it has to be able to take all possible primes and targets and pair them up for the relevant conditions, and because it's a repeated measures design, with counterbalancing by root, no root can be used more than once in the items across all the lists. The program, therefore, has to have the capacity to know when it has used a root and not use it again for any future primes or targets.

Once this part is done, then Amy will be able to splice out all the individual sound files and relabel them (thanks to Scott Jackson's brilliant Praat scripts), and then we move on to programming E-Prime. It sounds like a small number of steps, but I remain vigilant for pitfalls and unanticipated problems, since I know what can happen :-)

I'll update again when there's progress to report.