Why I haven't been crocheting

I think I will tell you about what I'm studying, to explain why it is that I haven't been blogging or crocheting!

I'm currently working on my thesis at the University of Kansas. I'm getting ready to run a study where I will record a speaker in an anechoic chamber (a chamber that doesn't echo) speaking a passage in English, a passage in Korean, and a list of target words in English. A photo of an anechoic chamber is above, but ours doesn't have the foam inside, because it isn't necessary. The building was built around it and it is basically suspended in midair. Its almost like a big walk in freezer, but not cold. Anyway, you can make pure high quality recordings. Its amazing.

I will then combine the word list over the English "background noise" and the Korean "background noise". My participants will listen to either one of these mashups and will try to remember the 9 words in order. At the end of the trial, the listeners will write down as many words as possible. Then I will analyze their data to see if Korean is more or less distracting than the English background (English will be the native language of all listeners). My pilot study suggests that English is, in fact, more distracting!

So I'm at the stage of finding a speaker, developing a word list and getting approval from the human subjects committee. These stages are all almost complete. Then I will run my participants and hopefully get writing next spring!

I am teaching Language and the Mind discussion sections as well, which keeps me quite busy. This is probably the most boring blog I've ever written (that's what you're thinking :))

I have actually been working on my son's hat a bit more. I've switched from single crocheting it to double to make it go faster! I do have to get cracking on the hats for my MIL so I can have them ready for her by Thanksgiving.

I also want to make some sort of basket for my son's toys. The current set up we have looks junky. I'm thinking about using my t-shirt yarn that I've been getting ready to make (oh face it its going to be a long while before its done).