Armory Park Utterologist

Finishing up in Jerusalem

2010-06-16T22:26:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-09T01:29:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-06-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-06T12:04:00.001-07:00

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!

Wrapping up in Malta

2010-05-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

It's the eve of our departure from Malta, and we've run 253 subjects so far. We are 17 short of completing the last experiment, and may get to run a few more tonight. I am pretty darn satisfied with our productivity here, and can't quite grasp that I have been here for four weeks - the time has flown by! And in a good way; I've been busy and engaged the entire time. Part of that is due to having various visitors come and stay with us for periods of our time here, and part of it is due to simply being so busy with work.

Andy and his parents got here Monday, and so the last few days have involved finding a nice balance between running subjects and sight-seeing. Luckily Kevin's been able to run subjects without me on the days when I've played hooky and been a tourist. On Tuesday afternoon, we went on a beautiful guided hike, led by a professional botanist, on the northwest edge of Malta, just north of Golden Bay. We got to learn all about the garrigue ecosystem and see some of the rare, undeveloped parts of the island - it was spectacular, especially at that time of day in the rays of the setting sun.

Yesterday, I finally got to visit two of the prehistoric temple period sights: Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, which are in pretty excellent condition considering their advanced age and exposure to the elements. Last night, Anna cooked us another wonderful fenkata - traditional Maltese rabbit - so memorable!

Another fun aspect of this trip is that I feel as though I've discovered about ten million potential future research projects that could be done here, time- and money-permitting. It's nice to know there's work to bring me back, although my friends here already provide a great reason to return. If I am lucky, I'll be back in November for the annual Maltese book fair in order to unveil some of the progress on our electronic dictionary project. And then again next April for the third annual International Maltese Linguistics Conference - hopefully with some interesting results from the experiments we're wrapping up right now. I am looking forward to cracking open these data files as soon as I can to start analyzing the data. But before then, I'll be enjoying a few days off in eastern Sicily, and heading to Israel next week for more Semitic psycholinguistics.

The Maltese adventure continues

2010-05-19T10:21:00.000-07:00

It's the middle of my third week here - by this time next week, I'll be getting ready to start packing and head out. Things have been going fine, aside from a nasty stomach bug I picked up recently. Interestingly, three out of four times that I have come to Malta I've gotten something similar. Luckily my Maltese friends, not to mention two Arizona students staying with me, are extremely helpful and friendly and offer a lot in the way of care and sympathy. I'm mostly better now, which is a relief - I essentially couldn't leave the apartment for 48 hours. Ah, the apartment - we're in a "new" apartment for this one week (the usual one happened to be booked, so we had to move out and will move back in this coming weekend). This new place is very conveniently located, just around the corner from the other place and sort of has a sea view. It's one of the older, original Sliema two-story town houses, which has some benefits and some drawbacks. It's quite charming, but...there's almost no water pressure in my shower, and the owners recently removed all the plaster and paint from the beautiful limestone block walls inside, so there is dust everywhere. And there's some weird mold growing on the grout between the blocks downstairs - that's a bit icky. It's cheaply furnished in such a way that everything feels flimsy. As a fellow vacation-rental owner, I almost feel obliged to draw up a list of things to improve for the owner. Almost.

Workwise, we've run 168 subjects now - that means we're about halfway done with the third of our four experiments. It's unbelievably cool. We have a lot of slots to fill up for next week, so we may not finish before our departure, but if we don't there's a colleague here who can likely run subjects after we go, which would be great. We're also getting ready for arriving in Jerusalem in a couple of weeks, where we plan to finish designing our Hebrew experiments and preparing the items, though those experiments will likely be run once we're gone. Kevin and I are also preparing two word familiarity studies in addition to the priming experiments; one on Hebrew and another on Palestinian Arabic.

Another work-related thing is that I gave a talk today at LREC - the Language Resources Evaluation Conference. This conference is enormous - something like 1000 attendees - and I ran into several people I know when I came to give my talk, though given my illness I had to flee right home after my talk. It was fun to come to a computational linguistics conference in Malta, and give a talk about Maltese (there may be one or two others among all the papers, but that's all).

The most exciting/unexpected thing by far: On Monday, despite being sick, I got to be on Maltese television! My colleague here, Manwel Mifsud, is a professor in the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta, and is also the president of the National Council of the Maltese language. Every Monday afternoon, he appears on television to discuss all aspects of the Maltese language, and he had asked me to be interviewed on the program this week. Even though I wasn't feeling 100% well, I went on anyway and had a great time! There were even live telephone callers phoning in during the show to ask questions - it was a really great experience and has shown me once again how much the people in Malta care about their language. It was really exciting to get to talk about why I care about it, given that to them I am some stranger from Arizona, of all places.

Continuing in Malta

2010-05-15T03:12:00.000-07:00

It's a nice weekend here in Malta, with some odd weather: rainy day yesterday, somewhat sunny and violently windy day today. It's actually quite beautiful.

This is just a brief progress report to note that our work in Malta is still going well. My student Kevin arrived a week ago and has been running subjects with me. We have finished one of four experiments and are almost done with the second. We've run 120 subjects so far and have many more slots to fill. Even if we don't quite finish, it's still some incredible progress. And our subjects are doing great - from little checks of the data, it appears that their accuracy rates tend to be between 85-96%, which is fantastic (and shows that the task is pretty doable).

In other news, it turns out that I may be interviewed on television here next week by a colleague and friend who's the president of the National Council of the Maltese language. I've been assured that the interview can be done in English, which is a relief given how little Maltese I actually know. Additionally, another project involving a Maltese dictionary is in progress and going great.

So overall I feel quite fortunate. I'm also lucky to have met a number of really fun Maltese friends - life here has been very engaging, from working intensely every day to having a really wonderful social life in the evenings. Two good friends from Tucson visited last week, and we had a great time together, and another student arrives this evening t spend a week here for the LREC conference taking place in Valletta next week (which reminds me, I have a talk to work on!). Andy and his parents should arrive at the end of next weekend for my final few days here, and I'm of course excited about that.

Back in Malta!

2010-05-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

Greetings all! The very fact that I am writing from Malta means that things are either going really well, or really badly. Luckily for me, this time, things are going great! If you happen to page back through my blog posts from January, 2009, you'll read about great despair, stress, and failure. Well, we have learned from our mistakes and at least, five days into Malta our experiments are going wonderfully. The key: prepare *everything* before even thinking about boarding the plane. Stimulus creation is hard. Item list creation is hard. Scripting is hard. Programming software is hard. It all takes enormous amounts of time from numerous experts, so coordination is also key. About a month ago, when I realized how close this trip was getting, I abandoned my sabbatical relaxation and moved into high gear for experiment preparation. Our Maltese speaker had been in Tucson in August and recorded all of our items for us, so those were ready. Or so we thought; it turned out we still needed a number of nonwords in order to have the correct set of counterbalanced items. In a fit of efficiency, I built a head-mounted microphone and overnighted it, along with a high-quality digital recorder, to Malta, where our speaker was able to record those few remaining items and then send back the .wav files. And voila - we were ready for the next step: creating item lists. Keep in mind that we are using two different methodologies (each one a different type of priming) and testing two separate related-priming types in addition to identity and unrelated priming. The result: four separate experiments, each with three counterbalanced lists, for a total of twelve individual experiments to run. Yikes! Luckily, I am married to the best programmer on the planet, and he devoted untold hours to writing a perl script that takes as an input file a set of words and nonwords and creates prime-target pairs. These get output into a text file read by Praat, which takes the individually spliced items and sews each prime-target pair into a single sound file for our regular priming experiment. For the other priming methodology, we use a Praat script written by another one of the best programmers on the planet to create some pretty cool-sounding items; you should come participate in the experiment so you can hear 'em :)

Once all of the stimuli were created by Praat, it was time to work with e-prime, the software that runs each experiment. E-prime is interesting, and consistent in at least one way: you can always count on needing a day or two to get it working properly. In our case, the stumbling blocks turned out to be fairly simple, and I was able to trouble-shoot everything myself (which did make me feel pretty competent, I have to admit, especially since e-prime tech support isn't great about responding within 24 hours). For instance, the button box used by subjects to respond to each stimulus has to be connected to the computer and this requires an annoyingly large set of steps, such as installing the proper driver for the serial-to-USB adaptor (who has a serial port anyway these days, come on!) and setting the port setting correctly in each experiment (i.e., 12 times).

Then it came time to program each experiment - they all have the same basic structure, it's just that with the Latin square design each counterbalanced list has different stimuli (aside from the foils or throw-away/distractor items). Because the version of e-prime we're using doesn't recognize UTF-8 character encoding, and because the Maltese alphabet involves a few non-ascii characters (ġ, ċ, ż, and ħ) we use a special system where we substitute numbers for those characters in the names of our stimuli sound files. However, each experiment also involves a set of instructions that subjects read prior to beginning the experiment, and since we can't use plain text to write Maltese we have to first create a powerpoint slide, turn it into a .bmp file, and use that .bmp file in the experiment. Not a hugely demanding step, but an extra step nonetheless.

In any case, by the time I left Tucson at 6 am on April 21, I had twelve working experiments. I think there are cracks in the ceiling at home from where I hit my head jumping for joy. I felt pretty good spending four days burning down the prairie in Wisconsin (controlled burns are part of our prairie restoration project of 400 acres in southwest Wisconsin, and also a great way to let go of stress), and then spent two wonderful days in Chicago, where Andy and I met with two colleagues working on another joint project. When I got on the flight to Frankfurt on April 26, I was feeling tentatively good about everything.

Four days getting over jet lag were spent in Italy, and then on May 1 (may day, may day!) I took the train to Rome and boarded my Air Malta flight. On Monday, I arrived at the university, ready to tackle installing e-prime on two computers in two different labs. The tech support people here are amazing. They worked for two hours on Monday, and though we ran into some problem with the installation, they were pretty sure how to fix them, and eventually did. It's amazing how complicated installing drivers for things like a USB key can be, not to mention for the button box. We also discovered a very bizarre bug in one of our twelve experiments (thank goodness not more than that!) in which a dynamic link (to our image .bmp files) turned into static links with a pathname from my laptop that wouldn't go away. Unexplainable, but nonetheless the tech guys manually edited my experiment script directly and fixed the problem. They returned bright and early on Tuesday morning and finished the installation, and I copied over my experiment files. And held my breath while I started testing them and...so far, they all seem to be working! In addition, hordes of students showed up to sign up as subjects, so the next two weeks are completely full, which is incredible; this isn't a place with a tradition of running experiments, but my colleagues here have done such a good job helping me recruit subjects.

Yesterday, I ran my first five subjects - I hadn't even planned to run anyone yet yesterday! But since I was ready, why not? Today, twelve more. Tomorrow is quite full too, etc. It's such a new and wonderful feeling for this to be working - it's almost as if I don't care what the results will be (but not quite). The only little snag as I've discovered is that getting 5-euro bills is challenging - they are quite scarce! I pay each subject 5 euros, and few of them can change a 10- or 20-euro bill.

In non-work news, I'm having a really lovely time so far. I'm getting to visit with good friends, and have also been able to attend an opera in Valletta one night and then a chamber recital in a church the next morning. I'm having dinner with friends in Valletta tonight, and attending another concert Saturday night. The weather is perfect, too - this is a great time of year to be here.

Who knows what the next four weeks will hold; hopefully more of the same. Perhaps I'll write about it...

What do you think?

2010-03-30T07:20:00.001-07:00

Here are the plans for the new TEP building downtown:

http://www.tucsonelectric.com/Company/News/UNSBuilding/index.asp

What do you think?

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.

Preliminary morphological family size results

2007-05-31T16:12:00.000-07:00

Although these results are only preliminary, and therefore to be interpreted with caution, it seems to be the case that the auditory lexical decision task recently run in Jerusalem shows the following:

1. there is a facilitatory effect of word frequency; that is, the more frequent a word in Hebrew, the faster its reaction time.

2. there is a facilitatory effect of related family size; that is, the more semantically-related morphological relatives a word has, the faster its reaction time.

3. there is an inhibitory effect of unrelated family size; that is, the more semantically-unrelated morphological relatives a word has, the slower its reaction time.

None of these results is *too* surprising, and in fact they replicate the identical effects found in the visual study on Hebrew done by Moscoso del Prado-Martin et al. 2005 in Journal of Memory and Language. However, never before have ANY of these effects been actually documented in Hebrew in spoken word recognition, and I am very proud to be the first to find such effects.

The best of Armory Park

2007-05-21T22:51:00.000-07:00

Again, the title of the post may not be completely accurate - though let's see how this goes...there's been much excitement and to-do in the 'hood lately. One topic concerns our neighborhood association board, which seems to be working on becoming a more efficient machine. At the same time, there are definitely people on the board who are so wedded to "the way it's always been done" that it's hard to make much progress. It is such an interesting sociological phenomenon to observe - that is, in the moments when I am not so frustrated at certain incompetencies that remain a consistent problem. But lest you think all I do is sit and complain, I'll say that I am optimistic that good changes are afoot.

With respect to neighborhood projects, things may be about to get exciting around here, though as I write that, I think back to every time in the past few years that similar promises have been made. Here's a list of exciting things that are "supposed" to start in the next few months:

- construction of the new 4th Avenue underpass
- construction of several downtown housing projects, including The Post, an exciting project on Congress St
- renovation of the former Santa Rita hotel
- widening of the I-10 freeway

There are certainly others as well, but I don't want to prematurely raise anyone's expectations. If any of these things happen, I will be so happy, and at this point, many of us in the neighborhood are willing to settle for less, if it means progress of some form. Downtown Tucson is such an incredibly cool place, independent of any of these good things, so if they happen, they can only help, but there seems to be in place a critical mass of coolness to begin with, and this keeps me satisfied.

So, there's reason to expect this to be a busy summer in the downtown development department - let's hope it happens!

The best of utterology

2007-05-21T22:38:00.000-07:00

Well, I am not sure the title of this post is actually quite so accurate, but after such a long lag since my previous post I have to attract attention from my readers somehow!

In utterology-related developments around here, there's been lots of progress on lots of work. Most exciting at the moment are about 23,000 data points on an experiment I've just finished running in Jerusalem, thanks to my very hard-working colleague there. In this study, we'll hopefully be able to gain some insight into the effects of morphological family size in spoken word recognition. By replicating an earlier study by a different group of researchers who found a facilitatory effect of "related family size", or how many semantically related morphological relatives a word has, I hope to discover whether, on the one hand, the effect is mirrored in auditory word recognition, or whether, on the other hand, as with neighborhood density, the effect is reversed in the auditory domain.

One of the most amazing things that I keep remarking as I do experimental work is the amount of effort that must be poured into any investigation. In this particular experiment, I was quite fortunate to be able to simply use the very same stimuli (albeit in auditory form) that the original study used - I will be eternally grateful to the authors of that paper for providing me with those, because essentially I got a pre-packaged set of items that varied with respect to the relevant independent variables (frequency, related family size, and unrelated family size) of interest.

Next step involved finding a native speaker of Hebrew to patiently sit in the sound booth in our phonetics lab and record the stimuli. This was followed by careful choosing of the best exemplars, and then measuring their duration and, thanks to my electronic corpus of Hebrew, determining each stimulus's uniqueness point, since measuring reaction time to auditory stimuli can be a tricky and sometimes risky business. A good example is the first experiment I did on Maltese a few years back, where we got prematurely excited at finding an effect when measuring reaction time from stimulus onset, only to quickly realize that the relevant factor was strictly correlated with stimulus length - and indeed, the effect disappeared when reaction time was measured from stimulus offset.

In the current study on Hebrew, we have an even more accurate place to measure from: the lexical uniqueness point of each word. So now it is just a matter of finessing the data files a bit more, though to get them in the right shape I've had to ask a professional computational linguist to translate data files into the appropriate format readable by statistics software (luckily, I live with such a linguist, and luckily I had an excellent RA able to do a lot of the item-related measurements).

I may have exciting results to report soon, if the experiment worked as planned. But overall, my point here is that I continue to have deep appreciation of the efforts required to carry out experimental work.

interesting poll results

2007-01-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

Although this may sound like a complaint, it's really more of an observation. A few weeks ago, when I began teaching a graduate phonology seminar (whose focus is more in the domain of morphology, actually), I asked all of my students - anonymously - to write down the names of two generative theories of morphology and one non-generative theory of morphology. Interestingly, they were all able to name one generative theory (and guess what? they all named the same one!) and none could name a second. And aside from one student, nobody could name a non-generative theory. I am not wise enough to know whether a generative model or a non-generative model is correct, of course, so my poll really wasn't some plot to get people to believe in any particular model, but I found it fascinating that their knowledge was so limited. So I worry that it's not a very good thing for students (or any linguist, for that matter) to be so closed-minded as to not even have the ability to name other theories. Yes, I have been losing sleep over this.

Tucson Government Intrigue!

2006-10-31T08:53:00.000-08:00

An unnamed source reports to me that this morning (Tuesday, Oct 31), Councilmember Nina Trasoff was spotted having coffee with Tom Volgy at a local coffee shop near the university. Could they be plotting his run for Tucson mayor next year? Current mayor Bob Walkup recently announced he'd be seeking a third term, and though he beat Tom Volgy in the last mayoral election, it could be the case that Tom Volgy plans another challenge. The thought of a (practically) all-Democratic city council is mighty appealing right about now...let's hope Nina and Tom are making some exciting plans!

Still alive...

2006-10-18T22:35:00.000-07:00

Yes indeed, here I am, after so many months of silence. What can I say... I am on my junior sabbatical. In any case, lots of exciting linguistics is getting done. A paper on Hebrew and Maltese psycholinguistics (focusing on - what else? - lexical access!) is in the works (to be submitted in the next month or so), and preparations for an additional experiment, this time on Hebrew morphological family size effects in spoken word recognition, are underway. I'm quickly learning that designing good experiments takes a lot of time, not to mention money - so a grant application for that is underway. Luckily I have colleagues abroad willing to run the experiment in their lab (don't panic, they'll be approved by our Human Subjects office first), which saves me the expense and anxiety of a trip to Jerusalem right now.

In neighborhood news, nothing out of the ordinary to report; various new residential buildings are going up, which is exciting, except for the ones where the builders have clearly ignored the plans approved by our historic zone advisory board. I'm hardly a fascist about such things, but I have to say, we're a pretty understanding board, and when someone blatantly does something we've told them is incompatible with the character of our neighborhood...well, even I get upset. You should see the reaction of some of the other people on the board! Downtown seems depressingly slow, aside from projects being spear-headed by private developers, such as the Rialto block. But downtown remains a vibrant and unique place nonetheless.

Tucson issue: downtown, 4th Avenue, and progress

2006-03-12T08:47:00.000-08:00

So our neighborhood sits to the south of an enormous empty lot (total blight in my opinion), which itself is south of Broadway across the street from the now-abandoned Greyhound Bus Station. For years, the city has planned to raze the station (it may even happen this decade!) and renovate the existing underpass to the north that allows bikes, pedestrians, and cars to reach North 4th Avenue from downtown. At the same time, the city's plan involved building a new underpass adjacent to the historic one - the new one was to carry bikes, pedestrians, cars, and the new streetcar, while the historic one was to carry pedestrians and...oh wait, just pedestrians. Right.

Along comes a developer (immediately making many people suspicious), and he's got a proposal to develop the land on which the Greyhound Bus Station currently sits. This plan was quite interesting and innovative, though one of the thorny issues it produced was a reduction in the number of underpasses from two to one. It also rerouted some downtown traffic in order to make reasonable use of land that otherwise would have been bisected by this street and that street, so the proposal actually enabled that land to be more productively used as a gateway to exciting downtown Tucson.

I sit on the board of our neighborhood association, and recently at a general meeting of the neighborhood, with about 60 people in attendance, the city transportation people presented this proposal. The reaction from about 90% of the neighborhood was vocally opposed to the proposal. Here are some of the reasons that were given:

(1) The proposal will cut Armory Park off from the rest of downtown.

(2) I won't be able to drive to downtown in under 20 minutes.

(3) This developer thinks we're all brown and poor and that he can take advantage of us because of that.

(4) The city spent years developing the original plan, so how can it be changed now?

Let me try to address each of these. Here is how my brain responded to each of these concerns:

(1) The proposal will NOT cut Armory Park off from the rest of downtown. There will still be access via Toole Ave to the underpass, as well as 6th Ave and Stone Ave (which will be become two-way streets).

(2) If you drive downtown instead of walking or biking there, you should consider moving into a gated community, from where you can drive everywhere you need to go. Get out of your cars, you morons!

(3) The racist presumption of reason (3) are too gross to dignify. Even if the majority of our neighborhood were poor and brown, I doubt this developer would be thinking he could walk all over us because of that.

(4) Even if the city did spend years developing the original plan, it has serious flaws. Who needs TWO underpasses, anyway?

Thankfully, several people in the meeting had the sense to point these things out, but the overwhelming attitude of the meeting shocked me: the level of contradiction, hypocrisy, and selfishness on the part of many participants was very unfortunate. Just because the developer's plan has some serious problems doesn't not require us to react so immaturely; the appropriate course of action is to ask for these troublesome elements of the proposal to be modified.

Ten days went by, during which some city council sub-committee met, and last Thursday, made a recommendation to the city council itself to adopt the developer's proposal with certain modifications. The modifications involve:

(1) A single underpass, created by renovating the existent one and widening it to accomodate all forms of traffic - yes, even bikes and pedestrians, who had been ignored in the developer's original proposal.

(2) Keeping Congress St open all the way through, thus avoiding a problem many people had with being "cut off".

(3) Turning Herbert Ave into a walkway between Broadway and Congress, making the site even more pedestrian friendly.

My reaction upon seeing this new plan was one of total relief, because it affirms my suspicion that the developer is a reasonable person who heard the concerns of the neighborhood and modified the plan accordingly. Apparently, city official also like the modified proposal and think it can be safely engineered. This is a win-win, folks! That awful Greyhound lot will become useful as a mixed-use space, with a very cool tall tower at the eastern edge of downtown - exactly the kind of landmark needed at a gateway interaction. I look forward to stepping out of my yard on South 4th Ave, looking north, and seeing this building (though I wish it were going to be much taller). I look forward to being able to safely cross Broadway and Congress on foot and on my bike, and I look forward to a wider, friendly 4th Ave underpass.

I really hope my neighbors feel the same way. There seems to be some bitter acrimony on the part of many people that I feel is unjustified. Get over it folks - you're getting just what you asked for! And please be nice to your hard-working city council members.

Progress!

2006-03-12T08:26:00.000-08:00

It's been months since my last post, but not for lack of energy or work, just haven't felt like blogging. But here I am - back, and we'll see how long this goes. So, much progress to report on two electronic dictionary projects:

(1) Hebrew dictionary: my very competent undergraduate independent study student has helped create a couple perl scripts that provide useful data from my electronic Hebrew dictionary. We can now type in a word, and get back all lexical neighbors of that word in the dictionary. This will be quite useful when fishing for experimental items if we want them to match in neighborhood density. Second, together with Andy W., he's written another perl script that will calculcate the uniqueness point for any word entered. What's nice about this script is that it accepts regular expressions, thus allowing me to calculate the average uniqueness point over any subset of the lexicon that can be described with a regular expression. Think of the possibilities! I have already calculates average uniqueness points for each of the seven binyanim (verbal classes) of Hebrew, and they all fall somewhere between the second and first segment from the right edge of the word. In other words, average uniqueness points are (as I have been predicting!) close to the end of the word. This has important consequences for lexical access which we can now begin to explore.

(2) Maltese dictionary: my hard-working graduate research assistant has been working on this for eight weeks now, and we now have a full text-editable Maltese-English dictionary! Nothing like this exists anywhere else for Maltese, so this feels very ground-breaking. Our next step is to turn the document into an xml database to be mined for all sorts of things, much like the Hebrew dictionary: we can calculate segment co-occurrence statistics, neighborhood densities, uniqueness points, etc. And since it's Maltese we can also do things like examine proportions of lexical sub-statra derived from different origins (most importantly, Semitic vs. non-Semitic). Also very exciting!

Meanwhile, a commentary on the somewhat larger picture: in many conversations lately with phonology colleagues worldwide, there seems to be a shared perception of an impending paradigm shift. "Watch out OT, your days seem to be numbered!" is what many of these colleagues are saying, and their voices are becoming louder and louder. It's been pretty clear for awhile now that the branches of linguistics outside of phonology have been awaiting this moment for awhile, and are keen to be able to start talking to phonologists once phonologists realize there's a bigger world out there than the world of formal constraints. In my own day-to-day life as a formally-trained phonologist, it's been exciting to connect with colleagues in psycholinguistics, language documentation and revitalization, computational linguistics, and phonetics, but much of the excitement doesn't involve OT anymore. My advice to those phonologists who are unsure of what to do in the face of this shift: be scientists! don't let your devotion to a particular approach or theory blind you to the reality that science involve progress, inevitably requiring the modification of extant theories, the creation of new theories (or - gasp! - looking back at old theories), or the exploration of data whose methodology and technology may be somewhat unfamiliar.

Some people ask me: Well, Adam, you can dish it out, but can you take it? Do I take my own advice? You bet! This semester, I have the extremely good fortune of not teaching (I could go on and on about how awesome that is!), and along with getting a bunch of papers finished and out there, I am auditing two classes, taught by two amazing colleagues here at the University of Arizona. Natasha Warner's "Statistics for Linguists" class rocks my world every Tuesday and Thursday - I can't believe I wasn't SPSS-literate before (not that I am quite the crack SPSS user yet, but I am working on it). The 2-factor within-subjects ANOVA is what's making me excited this week and next, and despite the streotypical attitude many people have toward statistics, I find it very stimulating. The other class is Ken Forster's seminar in Lexical Access, which is providing me with the opportunity to learn an almost overwhelming amount about different models of lexical access (including, of course, his own), as well as crucial information about experimental design and analysis (which we also cover in stats). So I am feeling a lot like I am being re-trained this semester, and it's terribly fun.

That's all for now, at least on the linguistics side of things. I may post something separately about various goings-on in the city.

Tucson Democrats Overcome Incumbent Republicans on City Council!

2005-11-09T08:19:00.000-08:00

Is it possible? Have the Democratic candidates really won? Amazingly, it seems to be the case! Nina Trasoff has unseated Fred Ronstadt, and Karen Uhlich beat Kathleen Dunbar, and by pretty wide margins. Never mind that voter turn-out was pathetically low - this is an incredible outcome! And now we must make sure that the new councilmembers make good on their campaign promises. At the moment, there's reason to be very optimistic. As reported by a local paper this morning, one of their first targets may be development impact fees, a no-brainer for many of us. In the meantime, get in touch with the new council members and speak your mind! Thank them for their hard work!

Phonology course materials

2005-10-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

For a long time, I've wished phonologists of the world could unite via some computerized database of problem sets and the like for use in course materials. I'm not alone in having this desideratum: check out this useful posting on phonoloblog.

I imagine linguists in other sub-areas (phonetics, syntax, etc.) would find something like this useful if it existed in their fields, too. In my phonology classes, I use a workbook developed by the kind folks at the UC Santa Cruz linguistics department, which contains a wealth of problems as well as many reference-type materials. Something like this could be a proto-version of the phonology problem set database of the future, perhaps.

Great Simpsons Line

2005-10-13T22:17:00.000-07:00

In a Simpsons rerun this evening, in an episode featuring medical marijuana, one of my favorite lines, by Otto (the schoolbus driver): "They call 'em fingers, but you never see 'em fing."

"The thing is is..."

2005-10-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

Have any of you noticed this construction lately? Sentence beginning with "The thing is is that ..." with the repetition of the word "is". I've noticed a huge surge in the use of this collocation, over the last five years, replacing what to me would be a more expected version: "The thing is..." with only one "is". OK, so I am obviously not the first one to notice this, and in fact there's a nice discussion of it at the Language Log from a little over a year ago. Any further thoughts?

What the heck is this thing for, anyway?

2005-10-11T21:47:00.000-07:00

OK, so this is day 2 of the life of this so-called blog. Hopefully, the name thing is clear by now. So perhaps readers want to know what this blog will focus on, and that's what I'd like to attempt to clarify now. Before I proceed, two noteworthy points:

(1) comments are always welcome - be supportive or be hostile, but please give me feedback.

(2) no promises are made about timely upkeep of this blog. Weeks, even months, may pass between postings.

Back to the point of this thing: now that you understand the name (see previous posting), it might make sense that this blog will be concerned with things related to linguistics and language, as well as things related to my neighborhood in Tucson. Examples follow:

- language-related example: did you know that in order to do OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the Maltese language you have to buy special OCR software, even though Maltese is written with the Latin alphabet? Yup, despite its being a Semitic language, Maltese is written in pretty much the same alphabet that you are reading right now! So why should an OCR program have difficulty recognizing Maltese characters? It's because Maltesehas several alphabetic characters that are unusual, including these: ġ, ċ, ż, ħ. Because one of my current research projects involves scanning a large amount of Maltese text for use as an electronic resource, I've had to contend with various programs that claim to successfully recognize these characters but that in reality can't tell ħ from l. Thank goodness I eventually discovered Read Iris v. 10, which so far seems to be doing a mostly bang-up job. Sometime soon I'll check in with my research assistant to find out if the bang-up trend is significant.

- neighborhood-related example: the city of Tucson has had a plan for awhile now (let's say at least 2 years, to be conservative) to renovate the underpass connecting North 4th Avenue to South 4th Avenue and to build a new overpass adjacent to it, the idea being that the existing underpass will become pedestrian-only while the new underpass will be for cars, bikes, and a new streetcar that might get built. Every couple of months, the city is presented with a new reason to delay construction. What should have begun in November, 2004 got delayed until May, 2005, then June, 2005, then Fall, 2005 (how nice and vague, especially in the desert southwest!). Current city projection: possibly May, 2006. Don't hold your breath, at least not without a forced-air ventilator attached, and a good book. And welcome to our fair city and its downtown revitalization.

Why the funny name?

2005-10-10T17:16:00.000-07:00

"Armory Park Utterologist" refers to several things:

(1) It has the same initials as my name (A.P.U.).

(2) It refers to where I live (Armory Park, a historic neighborhood in downtown Tucson, Arizona) and to my profession ("utterologist" being a newly-coined word for "professional linguist").