9.59/24.905  Lab in Psycholinguistics

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9.59/24.905  Lab in Psycholinguistics

Spring 2015

Instructors: Edward A Gibson, Sonal Jhaveri

TA: Richard Landy Jones Futrell

Lecture:  TR10.30-12  (46-4062)        

Information: 

In this class, students learn to design, conduct, analyze and present experiments on the structure and processing of human language, through hands-on experience. The main focus of the class is on constructing, conducting, analyzing and presenting an original and independent experimental project of publishable quality. This will include developing skills in using Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk and the statistical programming language R. We will also develop skills in reading and writing scientific research reports in human language research, including evaluating the methods section of a published paper, reading and understanding graphical displays and statistical claims about data, and evaluating theoretical claims based on experimental data.

The topics of research will all involve the structure and processing of human language. We will focus on issues regarding language as communication (including the field of pragmatics), the domain specificity / domain generality of language, and the relationship between language and thought.

Research Projects

Students choose a topic on human language research from a list provided by the instructors. Students design and conduct a replication of the published experiment. Then, with guidance from the instructor and the TA, students design, implement and analyze the results of an original experiment, which extends the first project in a novel direction. Students are encouraged to construct and conduct the experiments during lab time, when the TA or instructor will be available.

At the same time that students are choosing their topic for research, there are lectures and discussion classes presenting background on experimental research in language. For most of these classes, students write a brief report about one of the papers to be discussed. The reports will then be used by the instructor in guiding the discussion in class. Writing these discussion notes will help students to read and evaluate current research in the cognitive psychology of language.

Mechanical Turk

Most students will run their experiments on Mechanical Turk, a crowd-sourcing website available through Amazon.com, where one can get experimental participants efficiently. The department will pay to run these experiments.

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