Meetings | PsyCoL

The PsyCoL lab meets both as a reading group and to discuss members' current research projects.

Past meeting schedules

Spring 2019 Meeting Schedule

1/18 - Organizational meeting
1/25 - Amber Lubera - Neutralization and homophony avoidance in phonological learning (Yin and White, 2018)
2/1 - Jonathan Geary and Adam Ussishkin - Semantic and phonological form overlap effects in Hebrew auditory morphological priming (experiment report)
2/8 - Ken Forster - (experiment report); Additive and interactive effects of word frequency and masked repetition in the lexical decision task (Kinoshita, 2006)
2/15 - NO MEETING [Recruitment weekend]
2/22 - CANCELLED
3/1 - Andy Wedel - (practice talk)
3/8 - NO MEETING [Spring break]
3/15 - NO MEETING [CANCELLED]
3/22 - Jonathan Geary - Testing the role of phoneme order in lexical access using transposed-phoneme priming (poster, CUNY 2019)
3/29 - NO MEETING
4/5 - Jonathan Geary - Lexical precision in skilled readers: individual differences in masked neighbor priming (Andrews and Hersch, 2010); and Not all skilled readers have cracked the code: individual differences in masked form priming (Andrews and Lo, 2012)
4/12 - NO MEETING
4/19 - Amber Lubera - The effect of gender on word initial and word final entropy (prelim report)
4/26 - Noah Nelson (research report)

Date TBA

Adam Ussishkin, Shiloh Drake, and Kevin Schluter - Auditory morphological priming with English bound roots (experiment design)
Jonathan Geary - Phonemes: lexical access and beyond (Kazanina, Bowers, and Idsardi, 2018)
Jonathan Geary - Multimodel inference: understanding AIC and BIC in model selection (Burnham and Anderson, 2004)

Fall 2018 Meeting Schedule

8/24 - Organizational meeting
8/31 - Mai Naji - Comparison of native versus nonnative perception of vowel length contrasts in Arabic and Japanese (Tsukada, 2012)
9/7 - NO MEETING
9/14 - Jonathan Geary - What residualizing predictors in regression analyses does (and what it does not do) (Wurm and Fisicaro, 2014)
9/21 - Andy Wedel and Noah Nelson - How to capitalize on a priori contrasts in linear (mixed) models: a tutorial (Schad et al., 2018); Andy Wedel and Adam King (research report)
9/28 - Skye Anderson - The asymmetric contribution of consonants and vowels to phonological similarity: evidence from lexical priming (Turnbull and Peperkamp, 2017)
10/5 - NO MEETING
10/12 - Arizona Linguistics Circle 12 (location: Chavez 405; time: 2:00pm (registration starts at 12:30pm))
10/19 - Adam Ussishkin - Formal and semantic effects of morphological families on word recognition in Hebrew (Deutsch and Kuperman, 2018)
10/26 - Jaycie Ryrholm Martin (experiment report)
11/2 - Lucy Hall Hartley and Amber Lubera - The discriminative lexicon: a unified computational model for the lexicon and lexical processing in comprehension and production grounded not in (de)composition but in linear discriminative learning (Baayen et al., 2018)
11/9 - Jonathan Geary - Transposed-phoneme priming using auditory masked priming (experiment report)
11/16 - Lucy Hall Hartley - Learning homophones in context: easy cases are favored in the lexicon of natural languages (Dautriche et al., 2018)
11/23 - NO MEETING
11/30 - Noah Nelson - On visualizing phonetic data from repeated measures experiments with multiple random effects (Politzer-Ahles and Piccinini, 2018)
12/7 - Adam King

Spring 2018 Meeting Schedule

1/12 - organizational meeting
1/19 - Mariela Lopez - The effect of experience on the perception of the variants of (ch) in two Mexican Spanish dialects (experiment design workshop)
1/26 - Noah Nelson and Jonathan Geary - Evaluating significance in linear mixed-effects models in R (Luke 2017)
2/2 - Yiyun Zhao - Synonyms are lost during cultural transmission without an explicit bias against synonyms (talk, WEU)
2/9 - NO MEETING
2/16 - Adam King - The Bayesian new statistics: Hypothesis testing, estimation, meta-analysis, and power analysis from a Bayesian perspective. (Kruschke and Liddell, forthcoming)
2/23 - RECRUITMENT WEEKEND
3/2 - NO MEETING
3/9 - SPRING BREAK
3/16 - Noah Nelson - Winter, Bodo. (2013). Linear models and linear mixed effects models in R with linguistic applications. arXiv:1308.5499.
3/23 - Amy LaCross - Mandarin speech segmentation errors: influence of word size and tonal sequence probabilities (experiment report)
3/30 - Yiyun Zhao - Regularization based on wrong assumptions? (research proposal)
4/6 - Adam King - Incremental word processing helps shape the lexicon (talk, Evolang XII)
4/13 - Daphna Heller (University of Toronto) [Douglass 216, 10:00-11:00 am]
4/20 - NO MEETING
4/27 - NO MEETING
5/4 - NO MEETING

Statistics "Buddy System" Reading List

* Indicates that we will be discussing this paper during the PsyCoL Lab weekly meeting.

Fall 2017 Meeting Schedule

8/28 - organizational meeting
9/4 - NO MEETING (Labor Day)
9/11 - NO MEETING
9/18 - Grant/fellowship workshop
9/25 - Andy Wedel - Signal evolution within the word (dpt17, report); TBA
10/2 - Drake Asberry - The syllable in speech perception (experiment design workshop); Essa Batel - Word recognition in L2 sentence context (experiment design workshop)
10/9 - NO MEETING
10/16 - Noah Nelson - Effects of phonological neighborhood density on word production in Korean (Holliday and Turnbull 2015)
10/23 - NO MEETING
10/30 - Shiloh Drake - Maltese (report)
11/6 - Adam Ussishkin - Binyan productivity effects in Maltese (report)
11/13 - Jaycie Ryrholm Martin - L1 influence on verb-bias learning in an artificial language (experiment design workshop)
11/20 - NO MEETING
11/27 - NO MEETING
12/4 - NO MEETING

Related Events

12/13, 5:00 pm - Talks 'n' Tacos
- Jonathan Geary and Adam Ussishkin - Root-letter priming in Maltese visual word recognition (LSA 2018, talk)
- Jaycie Martin, Bozena Pajak, and Maryia Fedzechkina - (Over-)generalization of L1-to-L2 similarity: interference during L2 word order learning (LSA 2018, talk)

Summer 2017 Meeting Schedule

5/18 - no meeting
6/1 - Shiloh Drake - L1 biases, learning, and generalization in Semitic morphology (poster, Roots V)
6/15 - no meeting
6/29 - no meeting
7/13 - Jonathan Geary - The historical development of the Maltese plural suffixes -iet and -(i)jiet (talk, ICHL 23)
7/20 - Noah Nelson - Representing hyperarticulation as vectors in F1-F2 space (experiment design workshop)
7/27 - no meeting
8/10 - Andy Wedel - Information-reducing phonological rules are more common at the ends of words (brainstorming session)

Spring 2017 Meeting Schedule

1/13 - organizational meeting
1/20 - Ting Qian - FindingFive (remote experiment application)
1/27 - no meeting
2/3 - no meeting
2/10 - no meeting
2/17 - Jaycie Martin - L1 and L2 distance effects in learning L3 Dutch (Schepens et al. 2016); Learning complex features: a morphological account of L2 learnability (Schepens et al. 2013)
2/24 - Adam King - Redundancy and the lexicon: the effect of word informativity on word shape (talk, CUNY 2017)
3/3 - Kyle Jones - Acoustic variation in two types of gemination in Egyptian Arabic (talk, ASAL 31)
3/10 - no meeting
3/17 - no meeting
3/24 - Essa Batel - English L2 ambiguous words and the role of L2 verbal working memory (experiment design workshop); Adam King - Redundancy and the lexicon: the effect of word informativity on word shape (talk, CUNY 2017)
3/31 - Jonathan Geary - Root-letter priming effects in Maltese (experiment design workshop)
4/7 - Noah Nelson - Does the distributional similarity of minimal pairs predict contrastive hyperarticulation? (experiment design workshop)
4/14 - Daniel Withers - The semantics of function words and its implications for written word recognition (experiment design workshop)
4/21 - no meeting
4/28 - Diane Ohala - Effects of mutation on consonant acquisition in young Welsh-English bilinguals (experiment design workshop)
5/5 - Shiloh Drake - Productivity of the broken plural in Maltese (talk, GHILM6)

Fall 2016 Meeting Schedule

8/26 - organizational meeting
9/2 - Kyle Jones - The acoustics of word-final fake geminates in Egyptian Arabic (poster, ICA 2016)
9/9 - Andy Wedel
9/16 - Leah Rice - Syntactic structure and phrase processing (experiment design workshop)
9/23 - Essa Batel (experiment design workshop)
9/30 - Noah Nelson - Contrastive reduction of lax vowels in response to minimal pair competition (poster, AMP 2016)
10/7 - Shiloh Drake - Root-and-pattern morphology in the lexicon: evidence from wug tasks (poster, ML 10)
10/14 - Masha Fedzechkina - Processing and communication shape language learning and structure (practice talk)
- Processing and communication shape language learning and structure
- Researchers have long hypothesized that certain cross-lexical and grammatical properties of languages are common because they are beneficial for efficient processing and communication. What remains unknown is how such properties enter the linguistic system and come to shape languages over time. In this talk, I argue that these properties at least in part originate during language acquisition. I present a series of miniature artificial language learning experiments that investigate the hypothesis that biases towards efficient information processing and efficient information transmission influence learning. The findings support this hypothesis: when presented with inefficient input languages, learners produce languages that deviate subtly but systematically from the input, pushing the system to be more efficient. These newly acquired linguistic systems also tend to more closely resemble cross-linguistically common patterns in syntax and morphology than the input learners receive. This suggests that some cross-linguistic commonalities originate in biases for efficient processing and communication that operate during language acquisition.
10/21 - Daniel Withers - How many words can we read at once? More intervenor effects in masked priming (Forster 2013)
10/28 - Shiloh Drake & Adam Ussishkin - Finding words and rules in a speech stream: functional differences between vowels and consonants (Toro et al. 2008), Differential processing of consonants and vowels in the auditory modality: a cross-linguistic study (Delle Luche et al. 2014)
11/4 - Adam King
11/11 - no meeting
11/18 - Masha Fedzechkina
11/25 - no meeting
12/2 - no meeting

Related Events

9/23, 12-1:30pm - Adam Ussishkin - Morphology facilitates word recognition independently of phonology: evidence from auditory masked priming (Speech and Hearing Sciences Building 205, UA Cognitive Science Colloquium)

Morphology facilitates word recognition independently of phonology: evidence from auditory masked priming

Words consist of a phoneme or letter sequence that maps onto meaning. Most prominent theories of word recognition (auditory and visual) portray the recognition process as a connection between these small units and a semantic level. However, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting in the priming literature that there is an additional, morphological level that mediates the recognition process. In morphologically linear languages like English, however, morphemes and letter or sound sequences are co-extensive, so the source of priming effects between related words could be due to simple phonological overlap as opposed to morphological overlap. In Semitic languages, however, the nonlinear morphological structure of words reduces this confound, since the morphemes are interdigitated in a non-linear fashion. Semitic words are typically composed of a discontiguous root (made up of three consonants) embedded in a word pattern specifying the vowels and the ordering between consonants and vowels. Active-passive pairs in Maltese, the official language of Malta, illustrate this relationship (the root is underlined); e.g., fetah 'open'-miftuh 'opened'.

In this talk, I report on a number of experiments our lab has carried out in Maltese and Hebrew investigating the extent to which the non-linear morphemes used in Semitic facilitate auditory word recognition, and to what extent potential priming effects are independent of the phonological overlap typically inherent in morphological relationships. These experiments make use of the auditory masked priming technique (Kouider and Dupoux, 2005). I show that not only do roots facilitate auditory word recognition in these languages, but that these morphological effects are independent of phonological overlap effects