David's World

April 3, 2007

Psycholinguistics and mexican food in San Diego

Just returned from a 5-day trip to San Diego, California.

San Diego is a fun place - it's sunny, there's a beach with seals at La Jolla, and plenty of restaurants in Oldtown and in the Gaslamp District. They've got a park with a zoo and lots of jets zooming along over the park. And, after driving some 50,000 miles on the German Autobahn and other fast roads, I now had the first-time misfortune to see this boy's body in a bag on Interstate 5 while passing by.

A photo album with snapshots is here.

It was a work trip though - at CUNY, I heard interesting talks and presented some of my own work in computational psycho-linguistics. In lay-man's terms: we used a large collection of recorded dialogues between people to show that the more people adapt to each other in terms of linguistic structure, the more are they successful at communicating and jointly carrying out a task. (With J. D. Moore, Successful dialogue requires syntactic alignment, CUNY 2007). On a more technical note, I also presented evidence that people like to repeat syntactic structure when they speak, and that this repetition actually pertains to hierarchical structure - and not just sequences of word types, as some speech recognition developers like to simplify it. (With F. Keller and J. Hockenmaier, Corpus-based evidence against sequence priming)

I also learned that in the US, the green leaves of Coriander are called Cilantro - and I found out why I hate the stuff (I'm a supertaster). More about this soon.

Ahh, I didn't know you'd be in town -- we could have hung out and talked Emacs, and my wife is a linguist! :)