Ling 632: Laboratory and Quantitative Research Methods
Fall 2019: Tues & Thurs, 10:30a - 11:45a, Gen Lab (selected sessions) and Moore 227 (regular classroom)
Instructor and contact information
Instructor: Amy Schafer
Email: aschafer@hawaii.edu
Office: Moore 562
Office phone: 956-3226
General lab telephone: (808) 956-5854
Phonetics lab telephone: (808) 956-4618
Course description
This course covers commonly used techniques
for quantitative research on language, including small-scale studies that might be part of
field research and common experimental techniques used in the lab or
the field. It includes topics such as using Praat,
using spreadsheets, making graphs, conducting basic statistical analyses, using
experimental software (e.g., E-Prime), planning how many
participants/speakers you need for your study, learning ways in which your data
can be affected by what you present to/ask of your participants,
dealing with outlier values, and other aspects of
planning, analyzing, and presenting your study.
We'll discuss techniques that are common in research on speech
perception, speech production,
sentence comprehension, sentence production, first and second language
acquisition, experimental syntax, discourse processing, and
other areas. Because this is a general, introductory course, it will not
typically
cover techniques that are specific to one of these areas or provide
in-depth
treatment of any area, although advanced topics are possible,
with permission.
Who is this course for?
This is an introductory course, for any graduate student who is
conducting research on language. If you are interested in something more
advanced, talk to me about the possibility of specialized arrangements.
Next offering:
LING 632 is generally offered once per year. Students are encouraged
to take Ling 632 in conjunction with Ling 640Y
and/or other courses that rely on quantitative methods. Ling 632 can
precede, follow, or be taken concurrently with related courses. Contact me if you have specific questions about related courses.
Associated research and teaching laboratories
Prerequisites
None. That said, the course will be much more valuable if you have ideas that
you want to explore using laboratory tools, experiments, or quantitative methods. If you don’t have any
ideas yet, meet with your advisor for some suggestions. You do not need to have taken statistics to take this course.
Requirements it meets
This course counts as a methods course for the Department of
Linguistics, and is the default methods course for students pursuing an
experimental research program in Linguistics.
Course objectives
-
Engage in many of the principal methods of quantitative, experimental, and laboratory-based linguistic
research, including work with hardware, software, experimental design,
and analysis.
-
Extend your skills in critical and logical thinking by conducting exercises
in quantitative research.
-
Gain understanding of ethical issues and responsible conduct for language research.
-
Enhance your skills in describing laboratory, experimental, and quantitative methods in oral presentations
and written reports.
-
Acquire hands-on experience in a quantitative research method for one
area of language research by implementing a research project in the area,
demonstrating relevant techniques/methods, and turning in a description
of the your research methods. Note: Your project does not
need to be a novel idea for this class. You are encouraged to implement
a project that you are developing or have developed in another course,
such as LING 640Y.
(We'll discuss appropriate vs inappropriate overlap of course work in
class; check with me if you have questions before the term begins.)
Some useful links
LBC experiments
Open Science Framework
PsyArXiv
TROLLing
Software for experiments:
Praat software
(free; installed in the LAE Labs)
E-Prime (installed in the LAE Labs)
PsychoPy (free; installed in the LAE Labs)Phonetics:
Praat software
(plus Sublime Text for editing your scripts)
Indiana University online phonetics resources
Word recognition, corpora:
The Language Goldmine
English Lexicon Project
Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA)
Google N-Gram Viewer
British National Corpus
Age of Acquisition norms for
English content words (as of Aug 2012: link to Excel file for
norms; link to journal article about the norms)
Affective ratings for English words and Dutch words
Normed picture stimuli
IRIS database of instruments used in bilingualism research
WordNet (lexical database of English with sense relations)
EsPal (Spanish, includes word frequency)
VerbNet
Statistics, research design, and R:
R Project
R Studio
tidyverse (dplyr, ggplot2, etc)
UCLA Institute for Digital Research and Education: R FAQs
Statistical computation website
Research Design Explained: Instructor website
Research Design Explained: Student website Image sets:
Normed picture stimuli
IRIS database of instruments used in bilingualism research
Pictures of tools matched with other objects and non-objects
Sebastiaan Mathot's list of image sets (and more)
Sample tasks:
Dichotic
listening example 1 (by Russ Schuh, UCLA)
Visual word recognition
Auditory word recognition
Sentence processing
Maze task
Searching for references:
PsycInfo
GoogleScholar
with UH login (for full-text accesss to subscribed journals)
UH
Manoa research tools and databases
APA style guidelines:
American Psychological Association
(APA) style (and links for ordering manuals)
Purdue Online
Writing Lab info on APA style