Finishing up in Jerusalem

I always have mixed feelings here. While I get a lot of work done in Jerusalem (Ram Frost's lab and everyone in it are incredible), it's always a bit oppressive to live in Jerusalem. Usually I'm able to enjoy the focus on work - including this time - but getting out of here is always a relief, too, given the situation in Israel and Palestine. Today will be our last day in the lab for this trip, and we'll be wrapping up some very productive time. It's hard to overstate how wonderful all the people in the lab always are.

Kevin and I have been working on our Hebrew word familiarity experiment, which, thanks to the help we've gotten from the lab personnel, will be ready to run shortly. In addition. Kevin's been working tirelessly with our Palestinian Arabic consultants on creating the corpus serving as the basis for our items in the Arabic word familiarity experiment, and will even be creating auditory stimuli today, thanks to the digital recorder and home-made head-mounted microphone we've donated to the lab.

As for the priming experiments, the items are currently being recorded and that experiment will be all ready to go soon, too.

What's more, being here has resulted in ideas for many future projects that may feed my next grant proposal, which feels so good.

Oh, and a side-note on Maltese: a preliminary look at our data from the subliminal binyan priming experiment seems to reveal that we've potentially discovered a subliminal priming effect. More to come on that in the future; for now, I remain potentially optimistic just as for the auditory priming experiments I wrote about on this blog recently. And once the remaining subjects have been finished in the subliminal root priming experiment we'll be eager to look at that data too.

Tonight we'll be dining with 9 relatives from the US who happen to be in Jerusalem at the moment, which should be fun - we're going to Pasha, the fantastic Middle Eastern restaurant in East Jerusalem. Tomorrow is a meeting with another colleague or two, some friends, and then on Saturday we'll be flying away. Kevin's off to Rabat, Morocco, for eight weeks, while Andy and I will meander toward Tucson, with two fun stops along the way.