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.

News from the home front

We woke up today to a very exciting email regarding our entry in Tucson's xeriscape contest, sponsored by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. From the award ceremony script:

OUR NEXT AWARD IS A SPECIAL JUDGES AWARD FOR PUBLIC INTERPRETATION OF A XERISCAPE

EVERY YEAR THERE ARE A NUMBER OF FINE LANDSCAPE ENTRIES THAT INCORPORATE THE PRINCIPLES OF XERISCAPING, BOTH HOMEOWNERS AND PROFESSIONALS WHO HAVE SHOWN BY EXAMPLE HOW TO EFFICIENTLY MAINTAIN A LANDSCAPE AND LIVE IN HARMONY WITH OUR DESERT ENVIRONMENT.

THIS YEAR OUR JUDGES VISITED AND EVALUATED 10 RESIDENTIAL LANDSCAPES IN THE TUCSON METROPOLITAN AREA. THE LAST ONE THEY SAW COMPELLED THEM TO RECOMMEND A JUDGES AWARD FOR PUBLIC INTERPRETATION OF A XERISCAPE.

THE OWNERS OF THIS PROPERTY LIVE IN THE HISTORIC DOWNTOWN ARMORY PARK NEIGHBORHOOD. THEY HAVE DEVELOPED THEIR YARD INTO A BEAUTIFUL AND INTERESTING SPACE THAT CHANGES WITH THE SEASONS, CREATES HABITAT FOR BIRDS AND INSECTS, AND EDUCATES INTERESTED PASSERS-BY ABOUT HOW THEY CAN DO THE SAME IN THEIR OWN YARDS.

THE BOTANICAL DIVERSITY THAT THEY HAVE NURTURED HAS RESULTED IN MANY QUESTIONS FROM THEIR NEIGHBORS, AS WELL AS PASSING STRANGERS. THE OWNERS DECIDED SEVERAL YEARS AGO TO ATTACH A SIGN-BOARD TO THEIR FRONT WROUGHT-IRON FENCE AND PROVIDE SEASONALLY UPDATED EXPLANATIONS OF WHAT IS OCCURRING IN THEIR OWN PERSONAL WILDLAND HABITAT.

THEY HAVE GONE ABOVE AND BEYOND TAKING IT UP A NOTCH TO INCREASE AWARENESS AND INTEREST IN XERISCAPE PRINCIPLES, INVENTING INNOVATIVE WATER HARVESTING TECHNIQUES, WITH THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF ENCOURAGING THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEIGHBORHOOD-WIDE HABITAT. THEIR DEDICATION TO THE CONTINUING EDUCATION OF OTHERS ON THE NEED FOR, AND BEAUTY OF XERISCAPING TRULY IMPRESSED OUR JUDGES.

THE WINNERS OF THE JUDGES AWARD FOR PUBLIC INTERPRETATION OF A XERISCAPE ARE ANDY WEDEL AND ADAM USSISHKIN.

ANDY AND ADAM WERE UNABLE TO ATTEND TODAY, BUT GIVE THEM A HAND FOR GETTING THE XERISCAPE MESSAGE OUT TO THE PUBLIC.

Back to Maltese...

Work in Jerusalem continues apace. Priming experiment items are almost selected, and remain to be recorded, spliced, and programmed into DMDX. The two word familiarity experiments are coming along well too - items are being vetted by expert teams of native speakers for both Hebrew and Arabic. But today's potentially very exciting news concerns Maltese. A hugely important warning, though: the data you are about to see described have not been through any process of outlier removal, and no statistical analyses have been run. Translation: take this with a grain of salt.

First off, we only have data processed for our auditory priming experiments, but not our subliminal priming experiments. In the auditory experiments, subjects heard prime-target pairs. In the root priming experiment, there are three conditions: identity (prime and target are identical words), root-related (prime and target share a consonantal root but are in different binyanim), and unrelated (prime and target share neither a root nor a binyan). For pairs of real-word primes and real-word targets, here's our preliminary data:



In the binyan priming experiment, everything is the same except that in the related condition, the prime and the target share the same binyan. Here's that graph:



So, at the risk of overinterpreting, it appears that when a prime and a target share a consonantal root (but not a binyan), there is as much facilitation as when the prime and target are identical, but when a prime and a target share a binyan (but not a consonantal root) there is no such facilitation.

I'm not going to say anything more committal, since until we run the appropriate statistical analyses these are simply pretty pictures. But there we have it, our first look at the data.

greetings from Jerusalem

Well, I can't say I was thrilled to get on a plane to Israel on June 1. The previous day involved some rather scary events in and near Israel, and it was hard to know whether things would worsen. It's always a bit tricky for me to be here - the "situation" tends to constantly feel on the verge of worsening to the point of becoming dangerous, or at least crossing a line of comfort for me. At the same time, we have a lot of work to do on Hebrew and Arabic, and I know no more productive place to get such work done than in Ram Frost's incredible lab. Each day in the lab feels as productive as an entire week at home, if not more, and I really appreciate the chance to come work here.

So what are we working on? First, there are the priming experiments on Hebrew, which are identical to the ones we just finished running on Maltese last month. In addition to Kevin, Andy is here with me, and the two of them make us a pretty awesome team. We're going through enormous lists of Hebrew words, creating nonwords, and programming our item lists for the priming experiments. Secondly, Kevin and I have a little grant to carry out a couple of word familiarity experiments. One is on Hebrew, and is an elaboration of a similar experiment we did last year. The other is on Palestinian Arabic, which, thanks to Kevin's hard work, is moving along nicely and may represent the first such experiment on a spoken dialect of Arabic. We'll meet with our first native Arabic speaking consultant tomorrow, and we hope to have that experiment up and running very soon.

One nice thing about Jerusalem, and Israel in general, is that I sort of have a built-in social life here. Thanks to my parents' friends from 35+ years ago, there's a wonderful network of extremely friendly Israelis that I get to spend time with, in addition to my own Israeli friends and colleagues. It's a real pleasure to see people when there's downtime, and it helps the time pass more quickly. We're only here for another couple of weeks actually - then we begin the journey toward home. Till then, here's hoping we get even further with the research!