Lance W. Hahn, Ph.D.
Lab Director

Curtlyn Kramer, from Ashland, KY, is a second-year student at the Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science. Having worked in the lab before, her previous project was a behaviorally-based analysis of the role that sexual context plays in moral decision making. Her presentation of this work was awarded the title of "Best in Session: Social Sciences" at the 2011 WKU Student Research Conference. Her current project is focused on computational analysis of a large text corpus. By analyzing words and phrases which commonly co-occur with the words "he" and "she", she is attempting to derive an inventory of words which have strong gender connotations, but are not inherently masculine or feminine (e.g. butler is masculine where hairdresser is feminine).

 Taylor Leetis a current senior at The Carol Martin Gatton Academy. She was raised in Louisville, KY before moving to Bowling Green for her last two years of high school. Taylor first became interested in science when she watched the documentary The Making of Me. This is a film in which a homosexual man does an in depth exploration of nature versus nurture. Taylor's interest was immediately spiked and she decided that she would like to do genetic research. To see this interest through, Taylor conducted genomic research through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Genome Discovery Project. However, after having isolating and annotating DNA, she realized she was more interested in the psychological aspect of human sexuality than the biological side.

In August of 2011, Taylor met Dr. Lance Hahn at the Gatton Academy Research Fair where she learned of his various research projects. She found herself greatly intrigued by the research investigating the relationship between sex and aggression. Taylor is now currently conducting research on the relationship between sexual and aggressive primes and word recognition.

 Holly Morris was born and raised in Bowling Green, Kentucky before coming to the Gatton Academy at WKU. She has always enjoyed computers and learning through technology, so Dr. Hahn's Semantics Lab seemed like a natural fit. Currently, she is working on putting data into visual graphs using dot language and the Graphviz program which interprets dot files. This helps to show information in a way that is logical and orderly so that it can be more easily understood and presented. These graphs will be used to demonstrate spreading activation models of a distributed network of words and word sequences.

Duncan Wood is a freshman at WKU, and a junior in the Gatton Academy. He has always loved the sciences, and had never explored the frontier that is psychology (and semantics). Research into local context with Dr. Hahn seemed to be an optimal starting point, not only for developing a background in psychology, but also to gain experience in a lab research environment.

His work in the lab currently includes finding new five word n-grams to test on human subjects in the lab. This testing delves into theories of local context, or the influence of word sequences on word recognition. The hypothesis is that there are certain consistencies within word production choices that may allow the reader to expect specific words once the reader has encountered the beginning of a statement.