Our third STEP conference in May of 2016 was a huge success, with students and researchers from 18 different institutions. Over the course of the 6 days we experienced excellent teaching, met new colleagues and developed a deeper understanding of several varied topics in Psycholinguistics.
Topics covered included:
An Introduction to R and Psycholinguistic Data Analysis (Vincent Porretta, University of Alberta)
Using Speech in Psycholinguistics: From Speech Synthesis to Spoken Word Recognition (Benjamin V. Tucker & Daniel Brenner, University of Alberta)
Exploring the Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm: Introduction and Data Collection & Analyzing the Time Course of Eyetracking Data (Jacolien Van Rij, University of Groningen, Vincent Porretta & Juhani Järvikivi, University of Alberta)
Implicit Grammar (Harald Baayen, University of Tübingen)
Conducting Research with Bilingual Children: Topics and Methods (Johanne Paradis, University of Alberta)
Simple Approaches to Building and Combining New Behavioral Psycholinguistic Techniques (Gary Libben, Brock University)
Methods in Phonological Acquisition Analysis (Anne-Michelle Tessier & Kayla Day, University of Alberta)
An Introduction to Using GAMMs for Analyzing Eyetracking Data (Jacolien van Rij, University of Groningen)
Some highlights from the week include a Linguistics Grad Students event featuring Dr. Gary Libben, hands-on eyetracker training in the CCP labs and the day-long GAMMs workshop with Dr. Jacolien van Rij.
Here are some responses from past STEP attendees:
“The instructors were so willing to listen and talk and explain.”
“…it was helpful when there were two instructors and the second one could trouble-shoot individual issues while the first kept the class on track.”
“The way that the eye tracking course was structured was great – it’s rare to have training in the whole process of data collection and analysis using the same data.”
“Overall, the teaching was excellent and the instructors very generous with their time. “
“…I liked that the lab activities forced you to interact and really try to work with the data”