Hebrew Results

It's been ages, hasn't it? This short post is simply to say that our first two experiments on Hebrew (auditory priming) have produced some amazing results. Why? Well, because they are complicated. For one, the results look a lot like the results we got for Maltese, and this is surprising because of the fact that Maltese showed no binyan priming effects. We interpreted this as due to the low information value associated with the binyan in Maltese, where only half of the vocabulary even participates in the binyan system. In Hebrew on the other hand, every verb, including borrowed verbs, are part of the binyan system. And yet we're finding no binyan priming at all. This is also surprising because of the visual masked priming results in Hebrew, which shows clear binyan priming effects for Hebrew verbs. So we're puzzling over this, in addition to a very cool result that has to do with nonwords (I'll save the details for our paper...).

Finishing up in Jerusalem

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

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

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

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

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

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

News from the home front

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Maltese...

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

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



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



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

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

greetings from Jerusalem

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

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

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

Wrapping up in Malta

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

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.