Methods in Psycholinguistics

Over the past ten years, linguists have become increasingly interested in testing theories with a wider range of empirical data than the traditionally accepted introspective judgments of hand-selected linguistic examples. Consequently, linguistics has seen a surge of interest in psycholinguistic methods across all subfields. This course will provide an overview of various standard psycholinguistic techniques and measures, including offline judgments (e.g., binary categorization tasks like truth-value judgments, Likert scale ratings, continuous slider ratings), response times, reading times, eye-tracking, ERPs, and corpus methods. Students will present and discuss research articles. Students will also run an experiment (either a replication or an original design, if conducive to the student's research) to gain hands-on experience with experimental design and implementation in html/javascript and Mechanical Turk; data management, analysis, and visualization in R; and open science tools like git/github.