Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd to join BCS at Rochester

It’s great to be able to announce that the Center of Language Sciences at the University of Rochester is about to grow. Two new faculty, Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd, will join our Brain and Cognitive Science department, starting in the Summer of 2014. Chances are you know both of them, but here’s a short intro.

Celeste’s research focuses on decision making, attention, and language development in infants and children. Her recent work includes research on the trade-off between too much and too little information/surprisal in learning and how infants seem to be striving for a middle ground (the ‘Goldilocks effect’). She also recently revisited the well-known marshmallow study, putting an intriguing new twist on it: her study suggests that kids can prioritize long-term over short-term rewards, if they have evidence that the long-term rewards will reliably be delivered (see the paper).

Steven’s research focuses on probabilistic inference to learn and process language. His thesis investigated probabilistic models of semantic acquisition — how complex thoughts are acquired through composition out of simpler thought elements (thesis). He has also authored several beautiful papers on how communicative pressures (formalized in terms of information theory and probabilistic inference) are cross-linguistically reflected in the phonological structure of the mental lexicon. Another line of his research focuses on recursion – see, for example, his recent work on recursion in Piraha (talk).

Together they won the 2010 Computational Modeling Prize (Perception/Action) of the Cognitive Science Society.

now, this is broader impact

This is federal funds well-spent: after the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Daniel Pontillo reaches out to the broader public and explains –to a captive audience of night owls at packed IHOP– how eye-tracking data allows us to test how we process the world (the poster is on implicit naming, or rather the lack thereof, in visual world experiments). The presentation was a resounding success. One member of an underrepresented minority was likely recruited for a research career in the cognitive sciences. A brawl that later ensued on the same premises stands in no relation to this presentation, in which only waffles were harmed. Science never stops. We are grateful for all feedback received from IHOPers during the poster presentation.

(Disclaimer: federal funds were only used to print the poster, which was first presented at the Sentence Processing Conference.)

Dan Pontillo gives an impromptu poster presentation at the IHOP around 2-something a.m., Columbia, S.C.

Academic minute about Masha’s work

An academic minute about Masha Fedzechkina’s work on the existence of a bias for efficient information transfer during language acquisition just came out — you can listen to it here.

The work described in the minute appeared as:

Fedzechkina, M., Jaeger, T.F. & Newport, E. (2012). Language learners restructure their input to facilitate efficient communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 (44): 17897—17902.
[paper (DOI)] [BibTeX]

Unfortunately, they did not mention the team members (contrary to what I was assured). The lead author, Masha Fedzechkina, is a fourth year graduate student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. The work was jointly advised by Elissa Newport (the director of the new Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University) and me.

Special Issue on “Laboratory in the Field: Advances in cross-linguistic psycholinguistics”

Aim

We invite original and unpublished papers on psycholinguistic research on lesser-studied languages, for a special issue of Language and Cognitive Processes. Our purpose is to bring together researchers who are currently engaged in empirical research on language processing in typologically diverse languages, in order to establish the emerging field of cross-linguistic psycholinguistics as a cross-disciplinary research program. Both submissions that extend the empirical coverage of psycholinguistic theories (e.g., test whether supposedly universal processing mechanisms hold cross-linguistically) and submissions that revise and extend psycholinguistic and linguistic theory through quantitative data are welcome. The special issue will focus on the architecture and mechanisms underlying language processing (both comprehension and production) at the lexical and sentence level. This includes studies on phonological and morphological processing to the extent that they speak to the organization, representation, and processing of lexical units or the interaction of these processes with sentence processing. We seek behavioral, neurocognitive (e.g., ERP, fMRI), and quantitative corpus studies in any of these areas.

Effects of phonological overlap on fluency, speech rate, and word order in unscripted sentence production

The last two papers based on Katrina Furth’s and Caitie Hilliard’s work back when they were at Rochester just came out in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

The JEP:LMC paper investigates how lemma selection (i.e., word choice) is affected by phonological overlap. We find evidence for a (weak) bias against sequences of phonologically onset overlapping words. That is, when speakers have a choice, they seem to prefer sentences like “Hannah gave the hammer to the boy”, rather than “Hannah handed the hammer to the boy”. This suggests very early effects of phonology on lexical production, which seem to be incompatible with strictly serial models of word production.

Jaeger, T. F., Furth, K., and Hilliard, C. 2012. Phonological overlap affects lexical selection during sentence production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(5), 1439-1449. [doi: 10.1037/a0027862]

The Frontiers paper investigates

Language is shaped by brain’s desire for clarity and ease

Congratulations to Masha Fedzechkina on her article on a bias for efficient information transfer during language learning that has just appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (link to article).

Here’s some news coverage

• Thanks to the extended podcast coverage by the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, which present an interesting take on our study (a couple of details about ambiguity vs. uncertainty are a bit off, but the general message is captured well). Have a look at minutes 13:30 to 22:02. Thanks to Nick Kloehn for making us aware of this piece.
• www.eurekalert.org (e.g., here).
• Check out an extended article on ScienceOmega (Language learning balances clarity and effort)
• Universities at which the research was conducted:
  • University of Rochester (Language is shaped by brain’s desire for clarity and ease)
  • Georgetown University (PNAS Study: Language Structure Arises from Balance of Clear and Effective Communication).
• Blogs and more: Futurity, Phys.org, ScienceBlog, Science Daily, E-Science News , Sify, TruthDive , BioSpace

More to come soon.

Errata: We are sorry that in our paper we forgot to acknowledge the help of three undergraduate research assistants, Andy Wood, Irene Minkina, and Cassandra Donatelli, in preparing the video animations used during our artificial language learning task.

HLP lab will be at the LSA 2013 summer institute

Come join us in Ann Arbor, MI for the 2013 Summer Institute of the Linguistic Society of America. You can follow the institute on facebook.

Victor Ferreira and I will be organizing a workshop on How the brain accommodates variability in linguistic representations (more on that soonish). I will be teaching a class on regression and mixed models and I am sure a bunch of other folks from the lab will be there, too.

 

 

New R library for multilevel modeling

This might be of interest to many of you. MLwiN, a software package for multilevel modeling developed at Bristol that includes functions beyond those present in, e.g., lmer, now has an interface for R (kinda like WinBugs, etc.), so that you can continue to use R while taking advantage of the powerful tools in MLwiN. The package is called R2MLwiN. For more details, see below.

Dear all,
We are pleased to announce a new R package, R2MLwiN (Zhang et al. 2012)
that allows R users access to the functionality within MLwiN directly from
within the R package. This package has been developed as part of the e-STAT
ESRC digital social research programme grant along with the Stat-JR package.
See <http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/software/r2mlwin/> for more details
including examples taken from the book MCMC Estimation in MLwiN.

Feedback gratefully received by either me or Zhengzheng Zhang (Z.Zhang@bristol.ac.uk).

Best wishes,
  Bill Browne. 

Funding for international collaborations with HLP Lab and other labs at the U of R

Rochester just joined WUN, a world-wide network of universities, and there a funds for collaborations and research visits to and from Rochester. If this is of interest let me know.

NSF post-doctoral funding opportunities

Thanks to Jeff Runner, I just became aware of this post-doctoral program of the NSF (in SBE, i.e. the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences, which includes psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics). This program also recently underwent some changes. The program provides 2 years of funding. As for eligibility, let me quote the linked page: Ph.D. degree of the fellowship candidate must have been obtained within 24 months before application deadline (previously was within 30 months) or within 10 months after the application deadline (previously was 12 months).

Good luck to everyone interested.

Two new HLP lab papers and some thoughts on implicit learning

I am happy to report on two new HLP lab papers on implicit learning in language and beyond that recently were accepted for publication:

• Qian, T., Jaeger, T. F., and Aslin, R. 2012. Learning to Represent a Multi-Context Environment: More than Detecting Changes. Frontiers in Psychology 3.
• Fine, A. B. and Jaeger, T. F. in press. Evidence for implicit learning in adult language processing. Cognitive Science.

The first paper by Ting Qian is an opinion piece on learning and theories of learning in a world in which evidence is presented sequentially and where deviations from the expected always carry with them ambiguity about the cause of such deviation. So, how do learners figure out how to construct sufficiently adequate (i.e. good in coverage, though not necessarily accurate in terms of assumptions about the causes) causal theories of the world?

Woohoo: Chuck Fillmore wins ACL Lifetime Achievement Award

Congratulations to Chuck Fillmore for receiving this year’s ACL Lifetime Achievement Award!

congratulations to Ting Qian and Dave Kleinschmidt

Congratulations to Ting Qian and Dave Kleinschmidt, both students in the Brain and Cognitive Science Program at Rochester and members of HLP Lab, for being awarded a Google Travel Grant to CogSci 2012 in Sapporo, Japan, where they will present their work. which centers around implicit statistical learning and adaptation during language acquisition and processing:

• Qian, T., Reeder, P.A., Aslin, R.N., Tenenbaum, J.B., and Newport, E.L. 2012. Exploring the Role of Representation in Models of Grammatical Category Acquisition. In TBA (eds.) Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci12), TBA. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
• Kleinschmidt, D. and Jaeger, T. F. 2012. A continuum of phonetic adaptation: Evaluating an incremental belief-updating model of recalibration and selective adaptation. In TBA (eds.) Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci12), TBA. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
• Kleinschmidt, D., Fine, A. B., and Jaeger, T. F. 2012. A belief-updating model of adaptation and cue combination in syntactic comprehension. In TBA (eds.) Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci12), TBA. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

And, thank you, dear Google.

Some examples of web-based experiments

Since more an more folks are running web-based experiments (typically, via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or other platforms), I thought I’d put together a little sampling of demo experiments. We’ll keep updating this periodically, so feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed. Note that not all of the paradigms listed below have been developed by HLP Lab members (for credits, see below). We might release some of our paradigms for use by others soon. If you’re interested, please leave a comment below and subscribe to this page. This is the easiest way for us to make sure to keep you in the loop. Thank you for understanding.

The reproducibility project

Thanks to Anne Pier Salverda who made me aware of this project to replicate all studies in certain psych journals, including APA journals that publish psycholinguistic work, such as JEP:LMC. This might be a fine April fools joke slightly delayed, but it sure is a great idea! In a similar study researchers apparently found that 6 out of 53 cancer studies replicated (see linked article).

And while we are at it, here’s an article that, if followed, is guaranteed to increase the proportion of replications (whereas power, effect sizes, lower p-values, family-wise error corrections, min-F and all the other favorites out there are pretty much guaranteed to not do the job). Simmons et al 2011, published in Psychological Science, shows what we should all know but that is all too often forgotten or belittled: lax criteria in excluding data, adding additional subjects, transforming data, adding or removing covariates inflate the Type I error rate (in combination easily up to over 80% false negatives for p<.05!!!).  Enjoy.