Thesis is in!

Yay! I finished my thesis on Wednesday and I should be getting comments back on it tomorrow. I'm sure I'll have to revise it a lot, but it's good to have a full draft of it written. Next will be revising it for publication...if I don't melt from the heat first.

Thesising, Abstracts, New Stimuli

I'm quite excited to be almost done with my thesis. Essentially, I'm a general discussion away from having it signed off on - not bad. The goal is to have it submitted by the second week in June.

This week, I'll be writing an abstract for Psychonomics which will be held in Chicago in November. I'll be hoping to present a poster concerning a follow-up of some of my master's stuff. The experiment was designed to test two separate hypotheses about agreement error production - semantic integration and hierarchical feature passing - in one study. If it all works out, this study should provide a better picture on what is going on in agreement production. What I'd like to figure out is how meaning relationships, structural relationships, and order of production interact during the unconscious planning processes involved in producing subject-verb agreement.

This week, I should also be finding out how well the pictures for my new experiments scale down to fit on the computers we have in the lab. Once this is figured out, the drawing of stimuli, and lots of planning of experiments, will be able to proceed and what I hope to be break-neck pace. This will let me plan what my dissertation can look like, which is extremely useful. One of the pictures I hope to use is above - I'll explain more how this will work in a later post.

Thanks to Keith, a sentence processing lab RA, for his artistic abilities.

Picture Stimuli

This weekend, I worked on some ideas for picture stimuli for some future production experiments. I have always been concerned with the Bock & Miller (1991) and Franck et al. (2002) method of presenting stimuli. In B&M, they auditorily present NP PP preambles and participants repeat them back before going on to complete a full sentence. In Franck et al., participants read preambles off a computer screen and then go on to complete a sentence. Both of these methods have a pretty substantial flaw, in that they require comprehension of a pre-existing phrase (i.e., the message has to be extracted through comprehension). However, if participants were to use pictures to formulate a message, the comprehension aspect would be avoided. This is the goal for these experiments...we'll see how it goes.

And the writing begins...

Northeastern has officially finished its spring semester, and this means that I'm on summer break and done with my second year of graduate school!

It's been a pretty big year. In September, a group of my friends and I founded The Boston Society of Cognitive Science, or BSOCS for short. We got a lot of big name researchers/thinkers to come and talk to the graduate students in the Boston area about fundamental issues in cognitive science and related disciplines. In March, I presented my research on language production at the 21st Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing in Chapel Hill, NC and also defended my master's research at Northeastern. After a month of wandering aimlessly into the lab looking for RAs to entertain me, playing too much online Scrabble, and generally being useless, it's now time to write. My academic goals for this summer are to finish my thesis, submit my first manuscript, and begin to formulate the studies that will become the research program that will eventually become my dissertation - big stuff. I'm also thinking about working with the BSOCS organizers to turn our organization into a non-profit, which will probably require more writing and thinking.

My goal for this site is to keep all my contact information in one place, post interesting links about cognitive science or language research, and to update those who care about what I'm up to - mostly academically, but I'm sure personal stuff will find its way on here, too.

Thanks for visiting, and look for new stuff soon!