Why visit St. Petersburg? There is, of course, the tremendous amount of history, art, architecture, food, etc. to enjoy in such a beautiful city, but there’s also something else that is quite invaluable: lots of native Russian speakers!
Working in the Cognitive Studies Lab at St. Petersburg State University
In September Jeff Parker spent just over two weeks in St. Petersburg running experiments about the inflectional complexity of Russian nouns for his dissertation. He ran visual lexical decision tasks, masked priming visual lexical decisions tasks, word naming tasks and a word game (for Ryan Perkins’s project on palatalization). He was hosted by wonderful colleagues in the Cognitive Studies Lab at St. Petersburg State University; many thanks to Natalia Slioussar! The lab was located in the Bobrinsky Palace, just one street from the Neva river. There was some worry about whether two weeks would be enough time, but with 45 participants and over 100 tasks completed by the end of the stay, the trip was definitely a success.
Touring St. Petersburg, Russia
Given that the trip was almost exactly 10 years since Jeff had been in Russia last, it was nice that his wife Amy was able to come for part of the trip. Running experiments by day and touring Russia by night — the ideal life of a Slavic linguist.
After returning home, Jeff had just a few days to prepare preliminary results for a poster at AIMM3 in Amherst, MA.
Check out the poster: Processing inflectional complexity (Parker 2015, poster at AIMM3).