WoW Holiday Newsletter 2020

Greetings from the Canadian Leadership Team

Dear Friends,

We wish you and yours very happy holidays!

It has been a year filled with the unexpected.  In this context, we have worked, as a community, to advance knowledge, to support the development of new researchers, and to engage in important dialogue.  As we move to 2021, we are looking to build upon the success of the Words in the World Open Office Hours series and upon the success of the first Words in the World International Conference that took place just a couple of months ago. This conference featured 115 oral presentations and over 300 registrants from 17 countries. 

In the coming year we will also be working hard to build upon our public engagement in order to support our communities. This year, we have certainly seen how language can shape our sense of the present and the future. As language researchers, we have an important role to play building the knowledge that is crucial to the success and safety of societies and communities.

In this context, we wish you a very happy Christmas season and a fantastic 2021 filled with funhappiness, and enjoyment.

Gary Libben, Lori Buchanan, Gonia Jarema, Juhani Järvikivi, Eva Kehayia, Victor Kuperman, and Sid Segalowitz

P.S.  Italicized words in the last sentence comprise the six most highly rated English words reported by Warriner, Kuperman & Brysbaert (2014).

Words in the World Conversations

We are delighted to announce a new video series called Words in the World Conversations. This series of video interviews begins with Psycholinguists across the Words in the World network. The first interviews are with Prof. Wolfgang Dressler (Professor Emeritus, University of Vienna), Dr. Loraine Obler (Distinguished Professor, City University of New York) (planned release date: January 15, 2021), and Dr. Mark Aronoff (Distinguished Professor, Stonybrook University). These video interviews can be found on the Words in the World website at https://wordsintheworld.ca/research/videos/.

WoW in the News

In our summer newsletter, we announced the launch of the WritLarge app (https://akkyro.shinyapps.io/writlarge/) by Dr. Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen and Dr. Victor Kuperman (McMaster University). WritLarge is a web-based application designed to facilitate social mobility and relieve social isolation of older individuals through story-telling, writing, and sharing.

The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has recently published an article on the WritLarge app that discusses loneliness among seniors during Southern Ontario’s ongoing COVID-19 restrictions. You can read the article at this link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/senior-loneliness-study-covid-19-mcmaster-1.5821971.

Call for Participation

We are excited to announce an opportunity for collaboration in a project called ENRO (English Reading Online). This project is led by Dr. Victor Kuperman (Words in the World Co-Principal Investigator, McMaster University) and Dr. Noam Siegelman (Words in the World Collaborator, Haskins Laboratories). “The idea is to conduct online tests of English reading comprehension and its component skills in university student pools across multiple English and non-English speaking countries. A detailed questionnaire will also collect demographic and detailed language background information about participants. The end result will be a publicly available and continuously updated resource with data on English reading behavior and component skills (spelling, vocabulary, listening comprehension, decoding, and others), and a detailed record of individual language proficiency and background.”

You can read more about this opportunity at this link: https://wordsintheworld.ca/2020/12/10/call-for-participation-english-reading-online-enro/.

Upcoming Initiatives

Season 2 of Words in the World Open Office Hours

We are very pleased with the interest and participation generated in the 2020 season of Words in the World Open Office Hours. We’re looking forward to a second season of events, beginning in the new year! Details will be sent out via the Open Office Hours mailing list. If you’re not on the mailing list and would like to be, please let us know at this link: https://wordsintheworld.ca/home/open-office-hours/sign-up-for-open-office-hours/.  If there are topics or hosts that you would like to see on the 2021 Open Office Hours schedule, drop a note in our suggestion box at this link: https://wordsintheworld.ca/home/open-office-hours/suggestion-box/.

Handbook of Training and Mentorship – Call for Contributions

At our recent Words in the World International Conference 2020, Dr. Lori Buchanan hosted a discussion on a new opportunity for Words in the World Trainees and Collaborators. As a follow-up to that discussion, we are asking for expressions of interest (EOI) regarding chapters for a book/on-line resource that will focus on networked training.  If you are interested in contributing to this project, please send your EOI or questions to Dr. Lori Buchanan (buchanan@uwindsor.ca), Dr. Juhani Järvikivi (jarvikiv@ualberta.ca), or the grant at wordsintheworldgrant@gmail.com.

babySTEP

Spring Training in Experimental Psycholinguistics (STEP) returns in 2021. A series of babySTEP tutorials, starting in January 2021, will lead the way to the main event organized in May (dates TBA). All STEP2021 events will take place online. For further information and developments, see http://ccp.artsrn.ualberta.ca

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