Academic progress...(yawn)... so exciting
Jim finally, *finally* got back to me about my Language Origins essay. I was glad that he did, but he didn't really have any grand suggestions, like which journals to think about, word length, etc. In other words, the whole reason I e-mailed him to begin with. He just agreed with me that I should try to submit it for publication. I swear to God- it's so difficult to know sometimes if the guy just doesn't have respect for me personally or if he's just a poor advisor in general. I prefer the latter explanation, but who knows.
In other news, my dissertation seems to be going pretty smoothly. I had encountered a bit of a hang-up, of sorts, a few weeks ago, as most of the vignettes were just coming across as way too pretentious. Dave Cochran, Peter and a few other people were right. They just sounded way too arrogant and Peter predicted that they would probably *all* get very low ratings from people. Therefore, there was the very real concern from Peter that there would not be a very good "spread" of the data- i.e. one showing a linear relationship between attraction and vocabulary size. We sat down and had lunch together, however, at the LEC Seminar on "Evolutionary Approaches to Culture, Cognition and Communication" and talked for almost the whole hour about my project.
He came up with what I would call a really brilliant solution and I was really envious that I hadn't come up with it myself. He suggested that at the "low end" of the scale, i.e. vignettes that might be predicted to have the lowest ratings, we supplant with Basic English. Basic English is basically a rudimentary form of English that uses only 850 words yet can be used for something like 90% of all everyday uses of communication. I hadn't even thought of doing that until he suggested it, but it made perfect sense. He's a really amazing advisor, not to mention fun and down-to-earth. We talked and laughed for a few minutes about the pick-up lines study and about how cheesy some of the lines were. Like, "Hey babe, I'm Fred Flintstone. I'll bet I can make your Bed Rock!" ;) I would even dare say, that without the Coke-bottle glasses, he's actually a very cool dude.
Peter had to go early in order to finish up woth some things, so I strolled over to where Dave was sitting to finish the rest of the lunch hour. He was sitting next to this person I thought I had seen somewhere before. Once I sat down, I realised that she had been one of the presenters at Rome. I asked her if I had seen her during Evolang and she said yes. She had given a talk about her work with gesture and orangutans (I think). It turned out she is a PhD student at St. Andrews working with Richard Byrne and Tecumseh Fitch. I told her that I had thought about applying there next year. She asked me about what my interests were and I told her about my MSc project about sexual selection and vocabulary size. She seemed like she was really interested and then suggested that perhaps a similar project could be done with grammatical judgments and syntax. I was kind of floored that she said that and told her that's exactly what I had tentatively been planning on doing for my PhD proposal. She seemed like she was pretty smart, but that's about all we got to talk about before it was time to go back upstairs for the rest of the conference.
As things are now, I've decided to keep all of the vignettes' contexts the same, more-or-less. I've decided that this is really the best way to control for extraneous variables and noise in the data. It will also give me a great deal more statistical power, as I will be doing a within-subjects design, as opposed to a between-subjects. So, in order to keep the context constant and invariable, I've decided to make all of the vignettes as taking place within the office-work environment. I thought this was a pretty good solution, as any conversation in the world takes place around the water cooler, and intelligent people tend to work in the office, who might plausibly be using big vocabulary words. This is a much better venue, I think, than Peter's study on pick-up lines, in which most of the conversations tended to occur in bars.
In other news, my dissertation seems to be going pretty smoothly. I had encountered a bit of a hang-up, of sorts, a few weeks ago, as most of the vignettes were just coming across as way too pretentious. Dave Cochran, Peter and a few other people were right. They just sounded way too arrogant and Peter predicted that they would probably *all* get very low ratings from people. Therefore, there was the very real concern from Peter that there would not be a very good "spread" of the data- i.e. one showing a linear relationship between attraction and vocabulary size. We sat down and had lunch together, however, at the LEC Seminar on "Evolutionary Approaches to Culture, Cognition and Communication" and talked for almost the whole hour about my project.
He came up with what I would call a really brilliant solution and I was really envious that I hadn't come up with it myself. He suggested that at the "low end" of the scale, i.e. vignettes that might be predicted to have the lowest ratings, we supplant with Basic English. Basic English is basically a rudimentary form of English that uses only 850 words yet can be used for something like 90% of all everyday uses of communication. I hadn't even thought of doing that until he suggested it, but it made perfect sense. He's a really amazing advisor, not to mention fun and down-to-earth. We talked and laughed for a few minutes about the pick-up lines study and about how cheesy some of the lines were. Like, "Hey babe, I'm Fred Flintstone. I'll bet I can make your Bed Rock!" ;) I would even dare say, that without the Coke-bottle glasses, he's actually a very cool dude.
Peter had to go early in order to finish up woth some things, so I strolled over to where Dave was sitting to finish the rest of the lunch hour. He was sitting next to this person I thought I had seen somewhere before. Once I sat down, I realised that she had been one of the presenters at Rome. I asked her if I had seen her during Evolang and she said yes. She had given a talk about her work with gesture and orangutans (I think). It turned out she is a PhD student at St. Andrews working with Richard Byrne and Tecumseh Fitch. I told her that I had thought about applying there next year. She asked me about what my interests were and I told her about my MSc project about sexual selection and vocabulary size. She seemed like she was really interested and then suggested that perhaps a similar project could be done with grammatical judgments and syntax. I was kind of floored that she said that and told her that's exactly what I had tentatively been planning on doing for my PhD proposal. She seemed like she was pretty smart, but that's about all we got to talk about before it was time to go back upstairs for the rest of the conference.
As things are now, I've decided to keep all of the vignettes' contexts the same, more-or-less. I've decided that this is really the best way to control for extraneous variables and noise in the data. It will also give me a great deal more statistical power, as I will be doing a within-subjects design, as opposed to a between-subjects. So, in order to keep the context constant and invariable, I've decided to make all of the vignettes as taking place within the office-work environment. I thought this was a pretty good solution, as any conversation in the world takes place around the water cooler, and intelligent people tend to work in the office, who might plausibly be using big vocabulary words. This is a much better venue, I think, than Peter's study on pick-up lines, in which most of the conversations tended to occur in bars.