Winter Storm 2023 will be January 17-20!

Please RSVP here by Thursday, January 12. (An RSVP is not required to attend, but we really appreciate it to help with our planning and food orders!)

Winter Storm is the UMD Language Science community’s yearly two-week series of seminars and workshops designed to foster research skills, stimulate new interdisciplinary research projects, and boost career growth and job readiness. These workshops are FREE and open to all language scientists, encompassing undergraduates, research assistants, grad students, postdocs, faculty members, and researchers at affiliated research institutes.

Winter Storm organizing committee:

Gavkhar Abdurokhmonova (HDQM)
London Dixon (LING)
Katherine Howitt (LING)
Zhiyi Wu (SLA)

Schedule

This year the event will be primarily in-person at the Language Science Center in H.J. Patterson Hall:

Program details

Cocoaloquium (mornings)

We will have coffee, tea, and hot chocolate available every morning starting around 9:15am (earlier on Friday). If you're not participating in the data analysis workshops in the morning, we encourage you to come work quietly in the Hub, or less-quietly in any available rooms in the LSC. Let this be the start of a morning writing habit!

Technical skills workshops (mornings)

Introduction to R (Kathleen Oppenheimer): Tuesday - Friday, 9:30-11:30am, LSC Seminar Room
The intro R workshop will teach the basics of programming in R, with a focus on using tidyverse and dplyr to manipulate and visualize data. No background in statistics or programming is required, although attendees with programming experience are also welcome to join us and expand their skillsets. We use datasets that are of general interest so that no background in a specific area of language science is required, but attendees may also bring their own dataset to work on if they would like. Participants should bring a laptop and install R and RStudio. If you plan to attend, please fill out this form to help with Kathleen's planning!

Digital signal processing using Python (Meg Cychosz): Tuesday - Thursday, 9:30-11:30am, LSC Garage
This is a hands-on computing course, not a lecture series. You will interact with code in markdown notebooks allowing you to manipulate signals in real time on your own machine. You do not need to have a background in Python to benefit from the course—if you are proficient in R, C, or MATLAB you should be fine. However, novice programmers may have difficult in this course, since it won’t be covering basic topics in computing.

• Day 1: Introductions. We will introduce what digital signal processing is and how computers read continuous signals. Topics covered include: types of audio signals, sampling theory, quantization, clipping, time vs. frequency domain and measures therein. Practical skills include: how to read audio into a computer and perform basic measures and manipulations using short Python scripts.
• Day 2 Part I: Synthesizing signals. We will learn how to synthesize simple and complex signals. Practical skills include: manipulating signals to synthesize localization effects or different aspects of speech that can be used for experimental stimuli.
• Day 2 Part II: Fourier transforms. We will learn how to move between time and frequency domains. Topics covered include: DFTs, FFTs, leakage, aliasing, and windowing. Practical skills include: applying windows to signals and visualizing spectra.
• Day 3: Digital filters. We will learn how to alter signals' spectral shapes. Topics covered include: FIR and IIR filters, filter order, types of filters. Practical skills include: knowledge of how to choose the ideal filter and how to interpret signal processing language in an academic article. I will also briefly introduce channel vocoders for those who are interested.

Participants should bring a laptop and headphones (since you'll be playing audio samples back to yourself as you work). Before the first session, you should: (1) Install Python (for Mac, alsoinstall Homebrew and pip); (2) install Jupyter notebook; and (3) clone the Github repo. If you need help getting things installed or checking your setup, Meg will be available on Zoom on Friday, 1/13 1:30-2pm.

Computational analysis of MEG and EEG data using Eelbrain (Chiebuka Ohams, Shohini Bhattasali, Philip Resnik): Friday, 9-11:30am, LSC Garage
This session is intended for people who are already familiar with programming in Python. Please bring your laptop with you so that you can be hands-on. The very first thing we'll do to get started is for people to download and set up the software on their machines, using these steps. Please do this ahead of time if you can!

In this hands-on session, you'll learn how to use Christian Brodbeck's Eelbrain toolkit for computational analysis of MEG and EEG data using temporal response functions (TRFs). Eelbrain is a particularly nice framework for analysis of imaging data in naturalistic listening studies, but it could also potentially be useful in trial-based experimentation. See here for a recent paper using the toolkit, and here for an in-depth tutorial article.
 

Faculty life stories (during lunch)

Students have nominated four faculty to share their language science stories: why they got into the field, what keeps them interested, and highs and lows of their career (so far!).

• Tuesday: Bill Idsardi (LING)
• Wednesday: Yi Ting Huang (HESP)
• Thursday: Kira Gor (SLA)
• Friday: Rachel Romeo (HDQM)

Discussion groups (after lunch)

One of the main goals of Winter Storm is for students and faculty from different departments to meet each other and find out about intersecting research interests. In the past, discussions at Winter Storm have led to a variety of interdisciplinary collaborations. You don't have to be an expert to participate: just do the reading (at least some of it!), show up, be interested, and contribute your perspective. Some faculty have also been recruited to participate in at least some of the sessions for each group.

Discussion groups will meet every day after lunch, 1:15-2:15pm, in different spaces around the LSC.

Non-lexicalist psycho-/neuro-linguistics (LSC Garage and on Zoom)
Student leaders: Clara Cuonzo, London Dixon, Alex Krauska, Xinchi Yu
This discussion group will be hybrid; for the Zoom link, email Xinchi Yu (xcyu@umd.edu).
Many contemporary psycho-/neuro-linguistic theories involve lexicalist constructs like “lexical access” or “lexical items”, built up on the lexicalist assumption of “words” in theoretical linguistics. In this discussion group we will present our latest thoughts and discuss existing works on the limitations of this lexicalist assumption in the development of psycho-/neuro-linguistic theories, and offer the alternative of non-lexicalist psycho-/neuro-linguistics. For Tuesday's discussion, please read Haspelmath (2011). 

Statistical learning in language and literacy (LSC Seminar Room - HJP 2123)
Student leader: Jinglei Ren
This group will read and discuss articles 1) statistical learning across modalities and domains, 2) the different paradigms of statistical learning, and 3) how statistical learning plays a role in language and reading development. Group members can bring in readings for discussion, aiming to identify gaps in the literature. We hope to generate new research questions. To get the discussion started on Tuesday, please read (or re-read!) Saffran, Aslin, & Newport (1996).

Social cognition in language (LSC Hub)
Student leaders: Gavkhar Abdurokhmonova & Teresa Garcia
This discussion group is for anyone who is interested in the role of social cognition in language. We will discuss what social cognition is, the intersection between language processing and social cognition, and possible barriers preventing more connections between the fields of social cognition and language. Everyone is welcome to bring in their questions and readings. For the first session, please read Schaafsma et al. (2014).

Extra-linguistic factors in language (2118 HJP - classroom next door)
Student leader: Kelly Marshall
This group will read and discuss 1-2 articles each session selected from the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics literature about how non-linguistic cognitive abilities are related to language comprehension and production. Each day will focus on a subdomain of extralinguistic processes (e.g., attention, working memory, cognitive control). We will address how to define linguistic and extralinguistic constructs, discuss measurement considerations, specify overlaps in linguistic and extralinguistic processes, and address considerations of domain specificity versus generality. The group can bring questions about particular sub-domains of interest or specific issues relevant to their area of study, as well. For a nice introduction to how to think about some of these issues and example application, please read Key-DeLyria & Altmann (2016) for Tuesday’s discussion.

Professional development workshops (mid-afternoon)

Building your academic website (Joselyn Rodriguez): Tuesday, 2:30-3:30pm, LSC Garage
This tutorial will not be describing the content to put on your website, but how to make the website itself. The goal will be to put together a new website from scratch using a static site generator called Hugo and github host. This is just one way of building a website, but some other options will be introduced as well in case you want to pursue a different avenue in the future.
If you plan to attend, please fill out this google form to help with Joselyn's planning. IYou will also need to (1) install git on your computer (for Mac, you will need to install X-code, which comes up automatically when you type "git version" in the terminal if it is not already installed), (2) set up a github account, (3) install Hugo (follow instructions here, or on Mac first install Homebrew and then install Hugo using Homebrew as your package manager). Feel free to email Joselyn (jrodri20@umd.edu) before Tuesday if you need help!

Research statements for faculty jobs (Meg Cychosz): Wednesday, 2:30-3:30pm, LSC Garage
The research statement is an important part of the application package for faculty positions. In this session, you'll learn what the research statement is for, how it will be evaluated, and how you should go about writing yours. If you already have a draft research statement--even a partial one!--please bring it to the session.

Panel: Research careers outside the university setting: Thursday, 2:30-3:30pm, LSC Garage and online
Universities are not the only institutions where you can pursue a career in basic or applied research. In this session, you’ll hear from two PhDs about what it’s like to work in research outside the academy. Stephanie Kramer (U of Oregon ’17) is a Senior Researcher at Pew Research Center. Brendan Ritchie (UMD PHIL ‘15) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health.

The art of revision (Shevaun Lewis): Friday, 2:30-3:30pm, LSC Garage
No one writes well on their first draft. The key to good writing is revision! In this session we’ll discuss a few strategies and rules of thumb, and then get to work revising and discussing writing samples. Please bring at least one short (up to ~200 words) selection of your own writing to work on. It can be from anything: admission or fellowship essays, class papers, conference abstracts, published papers, etc. We will critique and edit the heck out of it, but don’t worry, we’ll be nice!