Midwest Speech & Language Days

Attended a joint meeting of the Midwest Speech and Language Days 2016 and the Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium at IU this weekend.  An interesting mix of topics, including some I wouldn't have come across otherwise.  Particularly interesting for linguistic theory was Charles Lin's experiment comparing the effects of two Chinese phonetic transcription systems (Pinyin transcribes segments, Zhuyin syllables) on responses in auditory phoneme identification tasks.  Most useful new method goes to John Jang and Chilin Shih for using force plates (very cheap and easy-to-use equipment!) to measure balance as a reflection of cognitive load.