coglanglab's blog
Although most behavior experiments are conducted in the lab, it's nice to be reminded occasionally that it's possible to conduct experiments in the human's natural environment...such as a nightclub.
I've been analyzing data from the Memory Test. The response to that experiment has been fantastic, so I'm able to look at performance based on age, from about 14 years old to about 84 years old. Interestingly, by 14 years old, people are performing at adult levels. I have a few kids in the 10-13 range, but not quite enough.
I have been reading Heim & Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar, which is an excellent introduction to formal semantics. On the whole, I've really liked the book, until I got to an example sentence in the 8th chapter:
(1) Every man placed a screen in front of him.
If you appreciated Saturday Night Live's Mother Lover, then this ode to ant navigation should be right up your alley, produced by student in Dave Barner's Developmental Psychology course at UCSD.
Academia is traditionally a good place to wait out recessions. Not so much this year.
I imagine the academic publishing industry is either hurting from or worried about digital theft, just like all other publishers. But some of the pressure is coming from other quarters.
Arjen Zondervan just presented a fascinating paper with the acknowledged long title "Effects of contextual manipulation on hearers' assumptions about speaker expertise, exhaustivity & real-time processing of the scalar implicature of or." He presented two thought-provoking experiments on
This week I am in Lyon, France, for the 3rd Experimental Pragmatics meeting. I had plans to live-blog CUNY and SRCD, neither of which quite happened, but I'm giving it a go for Day 2 of Xprag, and we'll see how it goes.
Raymond Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, predicts that by the 2030s, it will be possible to
PLoS One has published over 5,000 papers. Is that a sign of success or failure?
Scientists have long debated the evolution of language. Did it emerge along with the appearance of modern homo sapiens, 130,000-200,000 years ago? Or did it happen as late as 50,000 years ago, explaining the cultural ferment at that time?
The American Association of University Professors recently released a report on the financial situation of professors. One interesting datum apparently gleaned from the report is a ranking of universities by full professor salaries.
