HABLA lab

I’m off to the Asha meeting tomorrow (Tuesday). Committee day is Wednesday and I’m on the publications board. Then the convention starts early on Thursday. I’ll be hanging out at the posters most of the day, I find them probably most interesting and interactive. It’s a great time to see what’s new, talk to presenters, and run into friends.

Friday morning I’m thinking of having “office hours” over at Cafe du Monde. Probably the one at the Riverwalk Marketplace as that’s the one closest to the convention center– so, stop by and say hi– or come talk to me about graduate school, research, or whatever and have a cup of coffee. See you there.

It’s not all silliness at HABLA lab, we do actually get studies submitted for publication (and we have fun doing that too!). A couple of new things recently accepted for publication include:

Bilingual performance on nonword repetition in Spanish and English by Connie Summers, Tom Bohman, Ron Gillam, Liz Peña, and Lisa Bedore. This paper examined bilingual children’s performance on noword tasks in both Spanish and English.

What you hear and what you say: Language performance in Spanish-English bilinguals by Tom Bohman, Lisa Bedore, Liz Peña, Anita Mendez-Perez & Ron Gillam. This work examines children’s performance in preschool and kindergarten on morphosyntax and semantics tasks from the Bilingual English Spanish Oral Screener (BESOS). We collected these data during the first phase of the Diagnostic Markers Grant (funded by the NIDCD).

Okay, we deal with data all the time in the lab. We usually think of it as numbers (often zeros and ones) in a spreadsheet. But, how do we visualize data in ways that can be understood easily? One thing we often do is consider L1 and L2 by color and we’ve pretty consistently used red for Spanish, blue for English, and then shades (of purple) in between. We’re often limited to the graphs produced by excel and sometimes that’s not quite satisfactory.

Here, I found an interesting article and ways of picturing data…as they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

While all the ghosts and goblins are out trick or treating and haunting Austin town.

Who is here transcribing in SALT and working their fingers to the bone?

Okay, okay, this was yesterday. Some of us just wanted to have a little spooky fun.

In the midst of setting goals in the Ph.D. program, Karin and I decided to set one more goal: Run the Chicago Marathon.  After months of hard work and dedication we finished in under 5 hours and still felt great.  The weather was amazing!  The fans were awesome!  After finishing the marathon, we had a great sense of accomplishment.  Now we will try and keep up the running as we go forward to get to the finish line of our Ph.D. program.  It seems so much farther than 26.2 miles at times

As many of you know we have two pretty new training grants: Improving Treatment Practices (ITP) and the Academic Clinical Researcher Training project (ACRT). The ITP program is for MA students in the CSD program at UT. The ACRT project is to recruit Ph.D. students in speech-language pathology and audiology who are interested in clinical research focusing on kids. So we have these two programs, and we have an MA, AuD, Ph.D. and combination programs– and of course we offer coursework in a number of areas. One question that students ask is what WE look for when selecting students for the MA or Ph.D. programs. I can really only speak to the area of speech-language pathology, but I imagine my colleagues in audiology look at similar things. Read the rest of this entry »

So, it’s a good thing when people find your blog right? Yes, it is. It’s also a bit nerve-wracking, but that’s just temporary anxiety I think. It’s just that when you know people are reading your stuff you start to wonder whether you said it right or if you even have anything to say!!

The other day I was checking out the stats on the 2languages2worlds blog where I also post (along with other folks who do bilingualism research). It seems that the number of unique visitors had all of a sudden gone from about 20 or so a day to about 50 a day. I know that’s not a lot in the world of blogging, but we have a pretty small audience of people interested in bilingualism research (relatively speaking). Still, a little more than doubling of unique hits was pretty exciting! Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, back from DC where I was reviewing grants. It’s exhausting and interesting and even fun. The exhausting part is from the travel there and back. It’s a long day– starting at 7:30 (East Coast time) with breakfast. The meeting starts at 8:00 when the SRO reviews procedures with the panel after introductions.  We then review grants one at a time until it’s time for a quick break. The last meeting I think we broke for lunch about 12:30. At 1:30 we resumed again and went until dinner. Dinner was great, it was at Vidalia  (don’t worry not on your tax dollars!) Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the 57th anniversary of the patent on the barcode. And now we have one!

Well, as those in the HABLA lab probably have noticed (or not) I’m back in Austin– home of the weird. England and Wales was actually a lot of fun as well as a lot of work, but I did need to get back to things here. Right now, I’m in the process of reviewing: NIH grant proposals, a couple of manuscripts, and tenure & promotion files. Of course these are different kinds of reviews, but there are some similarities. It also makes me anxious to get back to my own writing and my own grant proposal! Read the rest of this entry »