Hello 🙂 I hope you had a good week. Today, I am going to share with you what I have been up to this week and recap what I have done up until this point. I will also be sharing what I hope to accomplish with the rest of my time here in the Netherlands.

It is so strange to say that my trip is already halfway done. While I have become comfortable with many things, I also feel that there are still many new things that I have yet to experience. Each day, I am exploring something new; whether it be a new restaurant, a new street, or a new walking path, the city hasn’t gotten old yet. In the past few weeks, I have been to Utrecht and Amsterdam. I also attended a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert. These have all been very exciting, but I have found a sense of relief returning to my room at the end of each adventure. It has actually been strange to feel like I am returning “home” each time that I come back to my hotel room.

This past week, my research partner and I have been hard at work. We finally finished our stimuli! Unfortunately, we will have to create three more versions of the stimuli with different sound to noise ratios of the background noise and the target words. This will take a while, but it is an important part of the experiment. If people are unable to hear the target words, then our data will be invalid. Once we pretest, we can create and run our experiment. I am looking forward to navigating LabVanced for our study. If you have experience with this program, I would love some help.

So far with my time in Nijmegen, I have connected with colleagues who work on the same floor as me, attended lab meetings, went to my first conference, visited the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics, named hundreds of files, edited hundreds of files, combined background noise and target sounds in Praat, and organized many sound files.

I have yet to run a pretest, create the study in LabVanced, gather data, and analyze results. These will be tasks for the last four weeks of my PIRE experience. Once I gather some data, I can share more information about the study and our findings.

I am looking forward to sharing more with you. Maybe I will even figure out how to run the study by the time of my next post.

Until next week,

Amira