- WHY ARE THERE SO MANY PAPERS TO READ? It is truly never-ending. I do realize that that is the point of the whole pursuit - generate discussion to generate more experiments to eventually generate better understanding - but it's just this rabbit hole of tightly interconnected ideas and hypotheses, and you can spend your whole life trying to figure out where to start, let alone jumping in and contributing something worthwhile to the discussion. Is this so abstract that it's completely opaque? Now that I've decided what type of experiments I'm running for my dissertation, I have to narrow down what exact questions I'm asking, and how to set up the experimental procedure so I make sure I'm actually getting data that answer those questions, and not some other, related questions that I didn't mean to ask. I'm doing some word learning studies, so now I'm sifting through papers on word learning, and it's all so interesting, but absolutely paralyzing. There are so many gosh darn variables, and I'm still figuring out which ones to try to ask questions about, and which ones I absolutely need to control for. (Word frequency: should I systematically manipulate the number of exposures the kids get to each word, or should I let them get as many exposures as they need to learn all the words? Memory consolidation: should I test them the same day I teach them the words, and/or should I make them have a night's sleep in between? Should I test them on multiple days? What if I count on testing them on multiple days, and then they don't want to be tested a second time? Recognition vs. production: should I incorporate a word recognition task into the training, or just focus on word production? If I incorporate a word recognition task, should I manipulate the phonetic details of the words they're hearing, so I get a test of whether they've generalized the phonetic information, or is that too many variables? etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum)
- On the bright side, I'm very excited about what I'm doing, and after I sift through a few more papers, I think I'll be ready to go...
- It's a beautiful day out, and I have enough of a cold that I feel justified staying at home for the day. So I slept in today and am now sitting in my screened-in porch style apartment with all the windows open, drinking coffee and taking notes on papers. It's fantastic, except that there are so many papers to read (see above), and I have to take breaks periodically, because it's a lot of concentrating. Hence the blog entry.
- I got paid last week! So I ordered a new phone for myself! Both things are very exciting for me, due to their very low frequency of occurrence; now that I've switched back to my fellowship, instead of teaching, I only get paid 3 times a year. And I just never buy a new phone, because I'm perfectly satisfied being a curmudgeonly luddite when it comes to phones. I don't want access to email and the internet 24 hours a day...
- One of my friends started a linguist intramural softball team! So I played softball twice last week, and we have our first game next week! It's really really fun to be playing softball again, but I'm fairly certain our team is going to be horrible, and that's okay. It's more about the experience.
Okay, back to work.
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