Lab in Psycholinguistics
Course facts
- Payment: Free, no certificate
- Credits: Non Credit
- Learning style: Self-paced, start anytime
- Resources: Lecture Notes; Programming Assignments
MIT OpenCourseWare details
- As taught in: Spring 2017
- Department: Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Linguistics and Philosophy
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Design, run and analyze psycholinguistics experiments: R, online participants, pragmatics, noisy-channel processing and language and thought.
How people produce and understand language can be tested experimentally, and crowdsourcing has made such experiments faster to run. This lab course gives hands-on experience designing, conducting, analyzing and presenting experiments on the structure and processing of human language. Students replicate a published psycholinguistics experiment with participants recruited online, then extend it with an original question, while readings and discussions cover language as communication, processing over a noisy channel, pragmatics and the links between language and thought.
What You Will Achieve
- Design a psycholinguistics experiment and run it online
- Manipulate, plot and test experimental data in R
- Replicate and extend a published result
- Write and present research as a polished paper
Program Overview
Methods and Data
Tools for running and analyzing experiments.
- Experimental methods and constraints on language
- Quantitative syntax and descriptive statistics
- Data analysis in R
- Recruiting participants on Mechanical Turk
Language as Communication
Core topics in language processing.
- Language as communication
- Processing over a noisy channel
- Long-distance extraction
- Pragmatics and referring expressions
Language, Thought and Culture
Wider questions and student projects.
- Syntactic priming
- The foreign language effect
- Color language and number
- Recursion and culture
Course Completion
Job Outlook
Experimental skills serve research in psycholinguistics, cognitive science, user research and data analysis.
Good for: Students with an introduction to psychology or linguistics who want to run their own language experiments.
Keep in mind: A spring 2017 course with lecture notes, four R problem sets with data files and detailed paper guidelines; the project relies on recruiting participants through a crowdsourcing platform.
Bottom line: A practical, well-structured guide to running psycholinguistics research and writing it up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do the problem sets use R?
R, for manipulating, plotting and testing data; the four problem sets come with CSV data files, including data from Mechanical Turk.
How does the replication project work?
Replicating an existing psycholinguistics paper by testing participants on Mechanical Turk, then extending it, written up across four papers and two talks.
How are readings discussed?
For many classes students read papers from the literature and submit a brief summary and critique on the morning of the class.
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