In my psycholinguistics seminar, we finished up a week or so ago with a discussion of the following paper:

Kemper, Susan, Marilyn Thompson, and Janet Marquis (2001). Longitudinal Change in Language Production: Effects of Aging and Dementia on Grammatical Complexity and Propositional Content. Psychology and Aging 16(4): 600-614.

Briefly, it is a ( Read more... )

I've been catching myself making a mental note not to forget nice things that happen, because I often find that when I have time to read the internet and do internety (i.e., not work-related) things, I'm usually in a bad mood due to the necessity of doing non-internety (i.e., work-related things) up until then. This is (fortunately) not an ( Read more... )

And I'm staying at home, making lemon curd. This involves stirring stuff over a double boiler for a while, so here I am, stirring:


( Read more... )

babylon_poet , as well as one of my office mates, used to comment that I looked like the kind of person who knows about computers. For babylon_poet , this impression came from the fact that I wear glasses and flannel overshirts.* For my office mate, the impression came from the fact that I learned how to use LaTeX and talk about it a lot. (I do talk about it a lot, but I ( Read more... )

In many, many novels, especially those written by Jane Austen, female characters make heavy use of a sudden headache whenever they wish to retire from company and be alone. Anne Elliot does this to avoid a dinner with Captain Wentworth. Lizzie does this when she discovers from Colonel Fitzwilliam that Mr. Darcy in fact took an active role in ( Read more... )

And I know exactly who he means, too!

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2579#more-2579

This entry was originally posted at my dreamwidth site, which I will be using as my primary journal rather than livejournal. Crossposting will continue until morale ( Read more... )

Matlab! I have no particular reason to feel that I need it, but some other people in the department do, and they started up a study group, which I decided to join. I am, after all, left to my own devices this summer, and there's no reason not to learn a new skill for free. I hear it is pretty good with "signal processing," which, if I understand ( Read more... )

You have the perfect day. Sometimes it takes a few days (or months or years) to realize that, in retrospect, everything was wonderful. For example: Mr. Philena and I once had a sort of almost-date back about two days before we became a couple. At the time, I remember it was extremely awkward. There were some pauses in the conversation, some ( Read more... )

• I have graduated with an MA in linguistics! The advantage of an enormous, faceless, anonymous university is that it is impossible for everyone to graduate at once. At the UofC, there was one commencement ceremony for all undergrads and MAs and PhDs, and it took forever and you had to sit through a lot of names and awards being given to people you ( Read more... )

I passed my MA exam on Friday. Professor Oakes ended up being something like 50 minutes late because he forgot it was at 9:00 instead of 10:00. As it turned out, the extra time to prepare was very helpful. I made some joke last week about having an optional meeting of a research group even though the exam was coming up, because, really, if an extra ( Read more... )