Armory Park Utterologist

Mid-summer night's relaxation

2009-07-14T20:49:00.000-07:00

I just peeked at the blog for the first time in a long time and discovered that it's been many months since my last posting, which took place amidst the crazy failures and pitfalls of fieldwork this past winter. I've since recovered a lot from that, and am having quite a productive summer.

Several new and exciting things to report here:

1. I have a real contract that's been signed by the State of AZ (on my behalf) and the publisher of the most authoritative Maltese-English dictionary. The work involves completion of the creation of the electronic form of the dictionary, and now that I am able to fund the work it's going to get done much faster than before. As part of the effort, I'll be traveling to Malta for a very quick trip in September, along with a graduate RA funded by this contract.

2. A paper co-written with two former students has been accepted at a computational linguistics conference in Spain, in a workshop focusing on corpora and other electronic resources for less-resourced languages. Our paper is one of only four that were accepted (it's on our Maltese online corpus), and I'm thrilled that this work will see the light of day. I'm also thrilled to have the chance to travel to Spain for the first time - another part of the trip this coming September, and I'll be presenting with my two co-authors, both of whom were RAs on my NSF grant.

3. I'm going to be giving two talks in Germany in September as well! Both are for the second meeting of the International Association of Maltese Linguistics, in Bremen. Yes, it's going to be quite the travel month for me. For one talk, my current RA and I are co-presenting a paper on word familiarity and word frequency in Maltese. For the second, I'm giving a workshop on database and corpus creation in Maltese.

4. Another trip I'll be taking is to a corpus linguistics conference in Edmonton this coming October. My two former RAs will be co-presenting with me on our work on the Hebrew and Maltese corpora.

5. Finally, I'd like to report that summertime is just as intensely busy, if not busier, than during the academic year. I can't tell you how many of my friends are shocked to hear this - for the academics reading this, you may also be accustomed to people asking, "Aren't you all off from work for the whole summer?" Yeah, right. I've been working on all of the above, plus working on two papers (one an overdue book chapter, another a revision of an earlier paper) and many other writing-related things. In addition, I've been running a pilot study of a new-ish type of auditory priming experiment, with about 15 subjects each week for two or three weeks so far.

So, that's about it for now. So what about this is relaxing (see the title of this post)? Well, it's a Tuesday night, mid-July, the monsoon winds are blowing outside, and it's beastly hot out. So there's no way I'm doing any work, at least not at this very moment. And that's quite a relaxing thought :-)

Till next time!

2009-01-24T01:52:00.000-08:00

It's 10.52 am on Saturday, January 24. Amy and I are sitting in our Sliema apartment, all packed except for our laptops, waiting for Ray, Anna, and Noah who have generously offered to take us to the airport. Today, we'll fly to Paris, spend a night there, and then continue tomorrow on the long journey to Tucson, where we'll arrive Sunday evening.

It's been a great time in Malta despite the setbacks. Beth Hume and Sandra Vella came during this past week and together with Ray the four of us got our Maltese 'ayin research going again; there's been some great progress there and more good work on it to come in the near future.

Amy gave a great talk on her Mongolian experiment this past week - it really sparked a lot of good questions and discussion. The next day, we gave a joint talk on our four Semitic experiments and had to all be thrown out of the room by the janitor because the question period wouldn't end - it was totally fun!

I'm looking forward to being back here next year (with running experiments, hehe). For now, I'm focused on getting home. It's been just shy of two months, and it's time.

Maltese experiments downgraded...again

2009-01-14T07:16:00.001-08:00

Unfortunately, we are missing so many sound files for Maltese that we won't be able to run our pilots. This was a hard decision to make, but I think the right one in the end. Given that we have limited money for subjects, and limited time (not to mention limited items, haha...) it just doesn't make sense to run an experiment that is likely to not tell us anything.

At the moment, there's a real sense of loss and disappointment, combined with a small sense of relief that we don't have to scramble under pressure to get everything ready by tomorrow. It's more logical to go home and design the right experiments, from the ground up.

Well, this has certainly been a learning experience.

Maltese experiments downgraded

2009-01-13T14:20:00.000-08:00

Well...some of our worst fears have been realized; we are missing a bunch of crucial sound files, and thus will not be able to run the full-scale experiments here this time. It's such a pity, too, because I was so convinced that we had everything. Makes me feel pretty idiotic to not have actually checked for sure before getting on that plane back on November 27! I am almost done hating myself for messing up so badly, actually - by now, I have some sense of perspective that this in fact NOT the end of the world, or even the end of my little world.

What we will be able to do is run a pilot, perhaps two pilots, with two Maltese verbal classes, rather than the four we were hoping for. I've also learned to plan much better, and in more specific ways, for the future. For instance, back up all our sound files daily (hourly?) and make sure that all potential items are spliced and accounted for BEFORE leaving. Also, it would help for us to have actually done item selection BEFORE leaving as well. Now that Andy has written a perl script that can be fed the various parameters that go into item selection, this step will be practically automated the next time, which means we have probably a pretty good chance that we can actually do this next year.

Since we're just running a short pilot or two I am guessing we'll be able to finish mid-week next week. Because of this, I've decided that we're going to come home early. With the spring semester beginning, and various responsibilities already accumulating, a large part of me would feel irresponsible for sitting around in Malta (even if I were to enjoy that) while missing teaching and other responsibilities back home. Add to that the fact that I've been gone almost two months already, and you can see how compelled I was to change our flights. We're leaving Malta January 24, spending the night in Paris (and dining at Le Sagittaire, which should be memorable), and flying from Paris to Tucson on January 25. I find this a good compromise between getting something done, and being able to go home sooner.

We'll know by tomorrow afternoon for sure whether or not our pilots are on. Andy's working on it now, but of course the poor man also deserves some sleep :-)

Mysterious Missing Maltese files

2009-01-12T03:02:00.000-08:00

Well, we've perhaps done it again. There's an entire set of Maltese sound files missing. What's weird is that both Amy and I have such good memories of recording those words, so there's plenty of evidence the sound files exist, but they don't seem to exist on our work laptops, and we can't find them on the server either.

This may be a death-blow to the Maltese experiments for now. I've emailed Andy to ask if he can re-do item selection excluding the items we're missing (it's the set of theme 1, 2, 5, and 7 verbs in Maltese that have no related verbs sharing their respective roots - what we call "orphan" verbs), but we're dubious about whether this would leave us sufficient items to run our experiments.

Sad. Disappointed. Frustrated. That's how we're feeling right now. If we end up not being able to run these experiments, we may come home earlier than planned, because the semester begins this week so work is already beginning to pile up at home.

Basking in Maltese

2009-01-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Andy's a programming genius! I have almost all the items we need now for BOTH experiments on Maltese selected and organized into prime-target pairs according to priming condition and distributed evenly among the four verbal classes we're using. I am experiencing a sense of relief that has been almost unknown in the past month and a half. I've also come to the realization that programming is one of the most valuable skills a psycholinguist could have (or, alternatively, that having a programmer for a partner is a really good idea).

Aside from wanting to learn programming, I'm also basking in the fact that for now, we are ahead of the curve. Who knows what bumps lay ahead; given our experience, anything is possible, and we'll cope with it all, but this post is dedicated to this beautiful sense of relief and productivity. Thanks, Andy! You're the best.

Maltese experiments in design/item selection phase

2009-01-09T03:49:00.000-08:00

Andy is programming up a storm. It's really challenging to splice strings out of a multidimensional array when the results have to be evenly distributed across four verbal classes, while at the same time counterbalancing by root for three priming conditions and avoiding phonological identity and similarity among prime-target pairs. Oh, and all target words are in the 20% or higher bin based on our word familiarity study. He's really close to getting it done, but he does leave tomorrow on a trip and so I feel nervous/high-strung about getting this all finished before he departs. I am finding myself working hard to process the balance between my awe at his ability to program and the stress of a looming deadline. To be worried is classic me, though, so I am pretty used to this type of situation.

In the meantime, we're going out this afternoon to enjoy some sights around Malta, and will finish off the day with dinner with Ray and his family this evening in Mdina. That should be really wonderful.

Malta musings

2009-01-08T00:53:00.000-08:00

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.

First post from Malta!

2009-01-05T12:21:00.001-08:00

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.

Last weekend in Jerusalem

2008-12-26T01:51:00.000-08:00

No real work stuff to report today. Amy and I went into the lab yesterday and had a mellow half-day working on prepping Maltese experiment design, in order to be ahead of any potential problems once we get to Malta next week. And last night was an extravagant and fun dinner at Ram's house - we made sushi all from scratch, and it turned out amazingly well. I am particularly proud that I managed to cook the sushi rice perfectly (in a regular pot, no rice cooker!). And Amy cooked up several stunningly good Chinese dishes.

I just came across an interesting article/commentary on Modern Hebrew (known to some as "Israeli"):

http://southjerusalem.com/2008/12/hebrew-as-she-is-spoke/

It's not by a linguist, but it's about a book by a linguist, and definitely is worth reading, even if the non-linguists express some scarily naive and prescriptivist views.

Since today is Friday, it's the weekend (in Israel, the weekend is Friday-Saturday, rather than Saturday-Sunday). I'm spending the morning drinking coffee and bumming around the internet with my laptop in a lively cafe, which is a really nice break from things like item selection and rogue sound files. Tonight, we're getting together with some good friends of my family for dinner, and tomorrow, if the weather cooperates, we'll spend the day at the dead sea. It's been decidedly wintry here - after two or so weeks of uncomfortably dry, sunny, warm weather, this week brought much colder temperatures and a fair amount of rain to Jerusalem. It's apparently rained significantly more in the rest of the country, causing flooding in places like Tel-Aviv. I had hoped for some snow in Jerusalem, but it just hasn't been cold enough. I think we'll get our fair share of real winter, though, when we head to Paris next week for the new year.

Wishing everyone a happy holiday!

Jerusalem update number 3

2008-12-24T04:51:00.000-08:00

Wow, when it rains, it pours: three blog posts in as many days - highly unusual for this blog! I suppose frustration, failure, and stress all need an outlet.

Well, our worst fears are confirmed: a bunch of Hebrew sound files are mysteriously missing. In our hectic attempt to be fully prepared for this trip, we failed to be as thorough as needed. I'm actually astonished by this, because not only am I a pretty organized person, but so is Amy, my incredible RA. If the two of us are having such a hard time, I suppose I should take some comfort in the situation, because perhaps it was simply inevitable that something like this would arise.

Luckily, the lab here in Jerusalem is happy to wait till we send them the complete list of items and sound files, which hopefully will happen in February after our return to Tucson (and after we beg our poor native Hebrew speaker to return to the recording booth). It's really a lucky thing that we are working with such amazing people in Jerusalem who are willing to do this for us.

In the meantime, I've moved on somewhat to Maltese, given that we'll be arriving there next week. I've created spreadsheets with lists of all the Maltese words we recorded, and soon we'll be able to rip those individual sound files out of the recordings and start item selection for Maltese. No matter how little progress we end up making, it'll all have been worth it, and we'll certainly be (better) prepared for the trip that we'll be making a year from now.

It's both hanukah and christmas - so being in Israel right now feels kind of neat, even though I'm not at all a religious person. Tonight we'll be having a christmas eve dinner with our very sweet neighbors (who happen to live in the house of a dear family friend who recently passed away), and then we'll walk to the Dormition Abbey for a midnight mass. I attended a concert at the same church five days ago, and it was unbelievably beautiful - a Lithuanian choir sang pieces ranging from Bach to modern and really filled the cathedral with beautiful music.

I suppose to be fair, I should say a few words about downtown Tucson, since so much of my recent blogging has been so linguistics-centric. I hear that the south end of the 4th Ave underpass has now been demolished (yay!) and that construction of the new underpass is proceeding well. The Scott Avenue improvement project is also apparently in full swing, and a new and welcome addition has arrived on the eastern end of downtown: Maynards Market. Although I haven't had the pleasure of seeing it in person, my sources tell me that Maynards is pretty swank, and does an impressive job of being site-specific (it's located in the historic train depot) and urban. I can't wait to get back home in February and see it for myself.

Fieldwork update number 2

2008-12-23T07:33:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Jerusalem, once again.

I think I mentioned a second pitfall in my previous post, but at the moment I've probably forgotten all the details because now we're trying to cope with pitfall number 4 - the most serious one yet.

Essentially, we're designing two priming experiments; one with consonantal root priming and another with verbal class (binyan) priming. Coming up with items (words and nonwords) is hard enough; having to counterbalance makes things even tougher. Essentially, to keep the experimental results valid, it's important to avoid giving the same subject a word or root more than once across the entire experiment. This holds not just for target/test items, but also for filler items, and we've spent about a week scrounging for items. Because each experiment has three priming conditions (identity priming, form priming, and unrelated/control priming), that means three different lists of items per experiment.

Ah - this brings me to pitfall number 2: we discovered an entire set of items that were missing. We know they were recorded back in Tucson in November, but given how little time we had, we kept poor track of our files, and somehow misplaced these. When we realized this, we decided to see if our team in Tucson could spring into action for us; luckily, we received superb support and help from a number of people, including two colleagues, a student, and of course, our native speaker of Hebrew in Tucson. Within a day, arrangements were made for him to come to the sound booth and record about 50 words for us - and they were waiting on our server when we woke up the next morning. Miraculous, truly miraculous.

Then, yesterday's pitfall was another minor one but one that requires lengthy, tedious work to fix. Our sound files were not uniformly named, meaning that creating the list of files that the software running the experiment (DMDX) reads ends up being much longer than anticipated. Note to self: implement uniform file naming protocol in the future! Having to put these non-uniform file names into our DMDX file is costing us serious time.

Today, though, we ran into some really aggravating problems. It appears that for some reason, we're missing a number of sound files. This is serious, utterly serious, and may prevent us from readying the experiment file before our departure from Israel (next Tuesday, Dec 30). Although my initial reaction is panic, dread, and total self-hating for letting this happen, I'm now trying to remain calm because even if we have to wait till we're back in Tucson to beg our poor native speaker to come back to the sound booth, we can always record the missing items and send them to the lab in Jerusalem.

However, we have two clocks ticking: the Hebrew clock, and the Maltese clock. On Jan 2, we arrive in Malta to spend four weeks, and in Malta we must be present to run the experiment, unlike in Jerusalem where there's a lab and grad students. It's unclear at this point whether we're going to run into the very same problems with our Maltese sound files and experiment design. So I am doing a lot of emotional work to stay convinced that even if we don't get anything run, we'll still have a productive and worthwhile time, and then we can run these experiments the next time; luckily, I did plan ahead enough to organize a second data collection trip a year from now.

But it's hard, and stressful; at the moment, I feel like quite a failure. I have to keep reminding myself that this is all a learning experience, and that no matter what, our time here has been productive. It's a good lesson in letting go of control, that's for sure!

More later, perhaps...

Fieldwork update number 1

2008-12-22T12:41:00.000-08:00

So, it's been ages since my last blogging, admittedly. The explanation is that I've been working hard for the past year on preparing for a data collection trip - December in Jerusalem, January in Malta.

The summer and fall semesters were spent on experimental design, item design, etc. Our incredibly patient and fun to work with native speaker of Maltese arrived in August to spend two weeks with us recording Maltese items - poor guy had to pronounce every Semitic verb in Maltese, plus about 10,000 nonwords in Maltese. We had planned to begin the same with a Hebrew speaker in September, but the original speaker bailed on us at the last minute, sending us into quite the panic as we searched for a suitable replacement. We finally found him, and he was also incredibly patient with us (he probably thinks we're crazy).

Amy and I arrived in Jerusalem on December 1, planning to run two experiments in the Verbal Processing Lab that Prof. Ram Frost directs at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Upon arriving, we encountered our first of several unexpected pitfalls (OK, we expect that there will be pitfalls, but we're never quite precise in advance about what exactly they will involve...)

The first pitfall involved our sound files. When we record our items in the recording booth in Arizona, we burn about 50-60 minutes of recording at a time to a CD, then upload the file to a computer, and our team of hard-working undergraduates goes to work in Praat adding a textgrid to the sound file, marking the best of the three tokens for each item with a transcription in IPA. We then run a super-cool Praat script on the textgrid that rips each transcription-item pairing out of the sound file into its own individual wave file. Unfortunately, for some reason our textgrid transcriptions involved a lot of unexpected carriage returns, which flabbergasted our script that otherwise works so well. Thanks to the astuteness of the script's author, Adam Baker, as well as valuable expertise from Paul Boersma and Jeff Berry, we were able to figure out what the problem was. And thanks to Jeff Berry's super powers, he was able to fix these textgrids so as to eliminate the unwanted carriage returns, and while he was at it, he avoided another potential pitfall by eliminating funny Unicode characters that our experiment software doesn't like.

This all set us back about a week. Next time, you'll get to hear about pitfall number 2...

End of May ramblings

2008-05-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

Linguistics-wise: summer's here, and the time is right for dancing in the streets! But seriously...there are several projects underway, most importantly transitioning from database construction for Hebrew and Maltese to item selection for experiments. I can't even begin to express how nice it is to have this grant! Pretty soon, we'll have word familiarity judgments for Maltese verbs, with a similar set of results from Hebrew coming later this summer if all goes well. All the computer equipment and software necessary for running the experiments next winter have been bought, and the lab will be working hard over the summer on item selection.

Outside my own projects, I've been avidly following an interesting blog-based discussion on phonology - an exchange between Phonoloblog and Mr. Verb. The issue is opacity, and whether/how various phonological theories are equipped to handle opacity. In particular, the discussion centers on Optimality Theory vs. rule-based serial approaches to opacity, and whether the mechanisms invoked by each approach count as theoretical "add-ons" (apparently a bad thing) or are just part of the original theory (apparently a better thing).

While fascinated by the discussion I've been a bit cautious of stepping into the debate. I don't really think either of these two approaches does a very satisfying job of handling opacity, regardless of what machinery is implemented to handle it. I'm also intrigued by recent work arguing for essentially serial implementations of OT used to deal with opacity.

Neighborhood-wise, the glass is definitely half-full. The 4th Ave underpass is proceeding quickly, and the concommitant work on street-car tracks south of the railroad tracks is moving fast as well. The exciting One North Fifth apartments are closing in on completion; I got a hard-hat tour of a 5th-floor apartment yesterday, and it was pretty impressive. It may be summer in Tucson, but things are definitely more active than normal.

end-of-April update

2008-04-30T06:23:00.000-07:00

Various bits of news as April comes to a close and the summer starts to heat up in Tucson:

Linguistics first:

1. Family size effects continue to intrigue me. I'll be re-writing a paper over the summer in which I try to model the Semitic lexicon based on these effects.

2. The Maltese database rocks, and the Hebrew database isn't far behind. I'm extremely grateful to Jerid Francom and Dainon Woudstra for their amazing talents and hard work.

3. I have a number of students working on really really cool end-of-semester projects. I feel so lucky to get to work with these students.

4. I got tenure. Yup!

Neighborhood-related stuff:

1. Sixth Ave and Stone Ave are now two-way streets from Broadway to 18th St. They are so much nicer now! Traffic has slowed to a delicious pace.

2. The wall hiding the old Carnegie Library (currently occupied by the Tucson Children's Museum) has been taken down, revealing an architectural gem. Way to go!

3. One North Fifth is making great progress - construction, not just destruction!

4. The 4th Ave underpass project is progressing so quickly, making all the traffic headaches worthwhile.

Goodbye, and good riddance

2008-04-15T06:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday marks an important event in downtown Tucson: the start of the demolition of the old 4th Avenue underpass. Read about it here: http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/234351

Why is the demolition such a good thing? The old underpass was in terrible shape; additionally it was unsafe for bicyclists and unfriendly for pedestrians. I've heard a few people express the notion that due to its historic status it should have been left untouched, but essentially it was a historic urinal in need of replacement. It's important to keep in mind that "historic" is not necessarily equivalent to "good", and that while it's possible (and sometimes a good thing) to maintain the historic character of a structure, neighborhood, or region, as time goes on and the world around us changes, some of these changes might be beneficial. A good example in Tucson is air conditioning: it's definitely not "historic", but without it, few of us would likely be able to stand living here.

I'm thrilled to see the old underpass go. Yesterday evening, with friends, I climbed down as close to the hard-hat zone as I could get to watch it crumble. We then went to the Tap Room at the Hotel Congress to celebrate this exciting progress.

Spring 2008

2008-03-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

Neighborhood-wise: things are moving nicely around downtown, with the Congress St detour out of the way and trolley tracks added; it's amazing to see such progress, including the undergrounding of ugly utility lines. Our own neighborhood seems to be running much more efficiently under its new leadership, which is quite exciting to see.

Linguistics-wise: lots of progress on the Semitic databases project; Maltese is practically finished, with one corpus left to tokenize, and several calculators left to finish up (neighborhood density, lexical uniqueness point, n-gram frequency). Hebrew is a bit trickier; some encoding issues have made that job a bit harder than anticipated, but my awesome RAs are getting the job done. In the meantime, I'm already making travel arrangements for next December and January (Jerusalem and Malta, respectively) and have already rented awesome pads in both places.

End of semester update

2007-12-08T13:04:00.000-08:00

Utterology-wise: NSF-funded work is going amazingly well; the first online Maltese corpus now exists - you can see it here. Deep gratitude to my research assistants, Dainon Woudstra and Jerid Francom for their hard work on this project, which will soon be migrating to a more secure location on my lab's website. Thanks as well to Albert Gatt, who provided me with 75% of the tokens in the database. Meeting Albert, a gifted computational linguist, was one of many benefits of attending the inaugural meeting of the International Society for Maltese Linguistics back in October. We're now proceeding with the Hebrew database side of the project.

Neighborhood-wise: Excitement abounds over the latest neighborhood elections. New blood will be joining the board, and leadership changes on next year's board herald perhaps a more proactive era; we'll see. I'm happy to say that I will be stepping down from the neighborhood association board after three years - I need the break. I'm sure I'll be back, though, after a year or so of relaxation. I should say that various recent events have left me feeling a bit discouraged, but the composition of the new board gives me renewed hope. For all the Armory Park residents reading this, please take note: when you get your membership forms in January, fill them out so you can officially join the association and take part in next year's election process. Turn-out was relatively low this year; we can do much better!

more Maltese utterology

2007-10-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

Another aspect of my ongoing research on Maltese, something that I am very pleased about, is the freshly unveiled Maltese token corpus. It's still in its initial stages, but thanks to the brilliance of Jerid Francom and Dainon Woudstra (my talented research assistants), we now have the first (of perhaps, one of the first) token corpora of Maltese, based on a Maltese newspaper. At over 500,000 tokens, it's pretty big for a first stab, and will hopefully get bigger very soon! It was great fun sharing this corpus with my Maltese colleagues in Bremen.

Maltese utterology

2007-10-22T05:49:00.000-07:00

I've just finished up at the inaugural conference of the International Society of Maltese Linguistics (otherwise known as l'Ghaqda Internazzjonali tal-lingwistika maltija) and I have to say, it was phenomenal! My former student, Alina Twist, and I were among a large number of invited speakers at the University of Bremen, which hosted this conference. In fact we were the only people whose talks were on psycholinguistics, though we weren't the only talks based on research in the experimental domain; there were several talks involving phonetic and acoustic measurements of aspects of Maltese. It was a really incredible gathering, with a real momentum to it, and another very pleasurable aspect was getting to see so many of our Maltese colleagues outside of Malta. I'm still totally buzzing from the whole experience, which was intellectually really stimulating, and hopefully the first of many such meetings. In the meantime, I am enjoying a few more days in Europe before returning to Tucson. It's quite cold here (I suppose that's normal, given that it's mid-October), and there is beautiful fall foliage everywhere I've been.

It's official!

2007-08-17T21:46:00.001-07:00

Well, after almost two months of unofficial-ness, it's now official: my three-year NSF grant has been awarded! It's still a bit overwhelming, but it's mainly very exciting...funding for three years of psycholinguistic research on Hebrew and Maltese. I'm very happy, and look forward to being able to report many interesting results.

Regressions

2007-08-01T13:21:00.000-07:00

A quick update on morphological family size statistics: additional regression analyses seem to continue supporting a facilitatory role for two factors in Hebrew lexical access: related family size, and word frequency, though apparently word frequency is only significantly facilitatory when taken as a linear measure rather than a log measure. Interesting. Additionally, unrelated family size has an inhibitory effect. This pretty much replicates the results from Moscoso del Prado-Martin's 2005 study but no one's ever done it in the auditory domain before our experiment. Also, there's never been a word frequency effect documented for Hebrew in the auditory domain, and interestingly, the frequency measures are based on a printed corpus and still have a significant effect in spoken word recognition. Neat!

The current goal is to figure out how to model this using mixed-effects modeling, which requires learning some more about R. To this end, Mike Hammond, Andy Wedel, and I plan to begin a reading group this semester to focus on learning how to use R. Based on a couple hours of work with the software yesterday, I clearly need such a group: I can't even get R to read my data file at the moment! There's nothing like being humbled by a command-line interface, that's for sure. Sigh.

Progress, progress everywhere

2007-08-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

Well, the work on the new 4th Ave underpass is coming along well! Lots of utility re-positioning is taking place these days, with Toole Ave and Congress St completely torn up. I've gained a new appreciation for the underpass and the ease with which it gets me to and from the office on my bike or by foot, since I've had to find a new route. The new route takes me a couple blocks west, to the 6th Ave underpass, which is not bad at all and only adds a couple of extra minutes to my daily bike ride. Today, I got to see the design specs for the planned new underpass and they look great - very modern while at the same time quite respectful of the historic nature of the underpass being replaced.

4th Avenue underpass: PROGRESS!

2007-06-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

Read all about it! Progress spotted today regarding the 4th Ave underpass project!!

Are you sitting down? Cause you should be! The city has delivered on its promise in the next step on the 4th Ave underpass project, and I am just SO thrilled! They have actually put up a NEW SIGN!! The NEW SIGN has an artist's rendering of the new underpass, from its north side looking
south.

This is like one half-step away from an actual new underpass. I am still in shock at how fast this is going.

Neighborhood silliness

2007-05-31T16:18:00.000-07:00

Warning: Skip this if you hate neighborhood silliness. You may, however, find the following items amusing:

1. Someone in our neighborhood has complained on the neighborhood list-serv about a local police officer who is citing drivers for disobeying traffic laws.

2. Someone (else) in our neighborhood wants to privatize the neighborhood streets and have the neighborhood take responsibility for re-paving and maintaining the quality of the streets.

I have respect for each of these two people, but find their ideas ludicrous. Personally, I'm quite happy when police officers enforce traffic laws in order to keep our streets safe from drivers who would otherwise speed on streets with 25 mph limits and sail through stop signs. As for privatizing our streets: as if anyone in the neighborhood has the time (or competence, for that matter) to re-pave and maintain them. I think our time and efforts would be much better spent being productive and not complaining nearly as often.

In other neighborhood news: construction on the new Fourth Avenue underpass is scheduled to begin soon. The latest progress involves a new sign, as promised on the old sign. Such progress! In other street construction news, any day now, we're told, we should see conversion from one-way to two-way traffic on 6th Avenue and Stone Avenue begin sometime soon.