Important Notice
It is with a heavy heart that we announce the cancellation of PLC 44 in its physical form. In light of the recent coronavirus outbreak and the uncertainty it poses for international travel and mass gatherings, we would not feel comfortable going ahead with the conference we have worked so hard to bring to life. We are extremely disappointed in this outcome, but we feel we are doing the right thing by not risking the wellbeing of our participants.
However, we do not want to give up on holding the conference entirely, and we have decided to explore the possibility of a virtual conference. The conference committee are actively researching platforms for this purpose, and give update at the end of the week.
Thank you for your support of PLC 44, and please do not hesitate to get in touch with questions or suggestions.
Schedule of Events
The schedule of events for PLC 44 is available. [here].
Abstracts of the talks are available below.
[Session 1A abstracts] [Session 1B abstracts]
[Session 2A abstracts] [Session 2B abstracts]
[Session 3A abstracts] [Session 3B abstracts]
[Session 4A abstracts] [Session 4B abstracts]
[Session 5A abstracts] [Session 5B abstracts]
Partner Event: PCIbex Workshop
On the morning of Friday, March 27, there is a workshop of potential interest to conference attendees that will be taking place on UPenn campus. PCIbex workshop introduces [PennController for IBEX (PCIbex) ], a new platform for online experiment design. If you are in town early for PLC and PCIbex workshop sounds interesting to you, you can indicate your interest here on this [registration form ]. See below for a more detailed description from the workshop organizers:
PCIbex provides a user-friendly yet powerful and versatile mini-script language for incorporating a diverse range of features in your experiment, such as multimedia support and dynamic unfolding of events. Everyone is welcome, just bring your laptop so you can follow along.
Our goal for the workshop will be to reproduce [this simple experiment]. We will develop and host experiments on the [PCIbex Farm], which comes with its own interface and requires no server setup, software installation or prior knowledge of a programming language. Focusing on fundamental concepts and the basic logic of the interface, this workshop will be useful both to researchers new to online experiments and ones with prior experience on other platforms. PennController for IBEX and the PCIbex Farm are free to use and open-source.
More about PennController for IBEX:
Online collection of experimental data is becoming increasingly common in linguistics and other fields, and allows for rapid collection of large amounts of data, speeding up behavioral research and pre-testing, e.g., for acquisition or neuroscience studies. However, experiment implementation options are largely quite limited in what they can do, or very expensive, resulting in many researchers creating their own code for custom-solutions. IBEX is a free, javascript-based platform for running experiments online, developed by Alex Drummond to conduct common text-based, psycho-linguistic tasks, including self-paced reading and rating studies.
PennController for IBEX (PCIbex) is an extension developed by Jeremy Zehr within a project in Florian Schwarz’s lab. It provides a versatile and user-friendly tool to implement more complex experimental task paradigms, with a wide range of dynamic and interactive features (e.g., visual stimuli, flexible, multi-stage trial structure, response feedback, scripted/ timed events, playing audio and video). PCIbex uses a stream-lined code interface requiring no javascript skills. It allows you to combine your own task template with a spreadsheet providing item-specific information. Combined with the free hosting offered at [https://expt.pcibex.net/] and templates that can be directly imported from github, posting simple experiments online just takes a few simple steps. For more details on usage and features, see the full [documentation], as well as the [support forum].