coglanglab's blog
I'm preparing a speech for later today on unrecognized ambiguity. Many sentences are ambiguous. Often we don't notice that these sentences are ambiguous, because we know what we intend to say. This probably explains many of the (reportedly) real newspaper headlines I'm using in the talk, most of which are worth reading again even if you already know them:
New research suggests that people are more likely to befriend and/or marry others who have a similar birth order. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date that birth order affects who we are.
The lab's website is in the process of being updated. Everything should be easier to find than it was previously, particularly the results from previous experiments (now labeled the 'findings' page).
A recent Pew survey finds that more Americans think scientists contribute a lot to society (70%) than do doctors (69%), engineers (64%), the clergy (40%), journalists (38%), artists (31%), lawyers (23%) or business executives (21%).
Using a time machine would be more difficult than it seems.
This summer, I organized two book clubs involving people from people in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Here are the books.
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
