Studying Psycholinguistics Out of the Lab

2020

What follows here are examples of possible prompts to experiments—referred to here as Explorations(following the work of Tom Roeper, UMASS)—in showing how students engaged in linguistic courses which require experimental design and data collection can go about creating often simple ways (even ‘kitchen-table’ ways) of eliciting data from subjects. I organize the prompts for explorations in the following manner: Section 1. In section 1.1, I present possible prompts to explorations as presented by various researchers such as Tom Roeper—who has come-up with the clever scheme of explorations, and a researcher I have personally known and collaborated with for several years on matters of child language acquisition—followed by other potential prompts suggestive of work done by researchers in the field, some of which are my own. This first section also provides some theoretical background to the potential exploration and could be read for hypothesizing aims and goals of the chosen experiment. Section 1.2 presents some background into Brain-related studies which involve Broca's Aphasia (Grodzinsky). Section 1.3 includes Further Explorations and theoretical implications (Roeper). Included in this section is some discussion into Language Disorders (DELV test). Section 1.4 is an Overview of Child Language Acquisition (theoretical background). Section 2. I leave the final section to what could be incorporated as possible prompts to explorations as found in the class readings of the text The Psychology of Language (Harley, 3rd).(I cite chapter and page number)

Language Sciences, 2012

People once believed a fabulous engine called the Scientific Method harvests empirical evidence through observation and experimentation, discards subjective, error ridden chaff, and delivers objective, veridical residues from which to spin threads of knowledge. Unfortunately, that engine is literally fabulous." (Bogen, 2002, p. 128

Tbilisi State University in Georgia hosted a truly significant event in June, 2016. Many scholars and school instructors from six continents gathered there to participate in the 11th Congress of the International Society of Applied Psycholinguistics (ISAPL). The event called Applied Psycholinguistics and Ecology of Language, Culture and Society showed a real potential of psycholinguistics to build intercultural bridges by fostering international contacts and cooperation among researchers, teaching staff who work in the field, and entrepreneurs and governmental officers who are interested in the scientific outcomes of the ISAPL Congress. This first 2016 volume that includes fourteen contributions by the authors from Bangladesh, Botswana, China, India, Iran, Norway, Sweden, Ukraine, USA embraces the cutting-edge topics of the ISAPL Congress. The most popular topic in the current journal issue is psycholinguistics of first and second or foreign language acquisition. Native tongue, EFL and ESL themes are discussed by Svitlana Buchatska, Olena Zarichna from the Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi State Pedagogical University of Vinnytsia (Ukraine); Melisa Grabovac from the Stockholm University (Sweden) and Oleksandr Kapranov from the University of Bergen (Norway); Taichi Yamashita and Hsiao Hsuang Hung from the Texas Tech University (USA); V. Kavitha and Padmasani Kannan from the Dr.M.G.R. Educational and Research Institute University (India); Shafinaz Sikder from the BRAC University (Bangladesh); Javad Ahmadi Fatalaki from the Allameh Tabataba'i University (Iran) together with Runhan Zhang from the Central University of Finance and Economics (China). An important part of the education philosophy in the field of psycholinguistics is introducing readers to genuine translation studies research, undertaken by two Ukrainian scholars, Tetiana Andriyenko from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Taras Shmiher from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, who offer cognitive perspectives to the solution of translation problems. A psycholinguistic and discourse analysis toolkit of verbal and pictorial units in media and communication is applied by Oleksandr Kholod from the Kyiv National University of Culture and Art (Ukraine); Valentyna Ushchyna and Larysa Makaruk from the Lesya Ukrainka Eastern European National University (Ukraine). Zoriana Matsyuk and Maria Fenko from the same institution suggest an original approach of fairy tale therapy for the speech development in pre-school children. Olusegun Emmanuel Afolabi from the University of Botswana gives an overview of clinical psycholinguistics approaches to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children. For better visibility and collaboration, the articles are published in open access on the journal site: http://eepl.at.ua, and deposited both in the scientific electronic archives of the European Union: https://zenodo.org and in the EENU Publishers repository: http://esnuir.eenu.edu.ua. We are very thankful both to the authors and the reviewers who invested their time and efforts in the volume production, evaluation and knowledge sharing process. We strongly believe that the research outcomes and goals achieved by the international team of the authors will be a valuable contribution to better understanding the ecology of human linguistic and cultural relations in today’s rapidly changing society.

Avances en Psicologia Latinoamericana

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 2000

Routledge Handbook of Experimental Sociolinguistics, 2023

Sociolinguistics is dedicated to understanding the relationship between language and the social world. The contemporary field of sociolinguistics coalesced in the 1960s, largely in reaction to the emergence of Chomsky’s generativist approach (Chomsky, 1965) and its insistence on the separation between competence (an individual’s knowledge of a language) and performance (the observable patterns of language use). For Chomsky (1965, p. 3), only competence was important to the development of linguistic theory, with actual performance seen as “grammatically irrelevant.” Scholars such as John Gumperz, Dell Hymes and William Labov took issue with Chomsky’s position, arguing that it offered an impoverished view of language that artificially separated analyses of a language’s grammatical “correctness” from the rules governing its everyday use (Hymes, 1966). Instead, they argued for the need to treat language as both a cognitive and a social phenomenon, where the object of study is not only what utterances count as “well-formed” but also how those well-formed utterances are used. Gumperz, Hymes and Labov approached this task differently. For Gumperz, the focus was on how individuals use language strategically in interaction to achieve specific social and interactional goals (by, for example, switching to a different code when giving an order or making a request; see Gumperz, 1982). Hymes (1974) focused on language as part of a broader cultural ecology, considering the ways that language contributes to the more general social life of a community. Labov remained closest to Chomsky’s goal of developing a theory of language itself as a system, though with the understanding that doing so required two innovations. The first is that language is heterogeneous (Weinreich et al., 1968): competence does not entail homogeneity. Instead, there are “alternate ways of saying the ‘same thing’ ” (Labov, 1972). Second, this heterogeneity is ordered. Its appearance is not haphazard or “free”. Rather, variability in language is systematically distributed across social divisions, such that certain ways of speaking (“variants”) are associated with some social groups or situations, and other ways with others. For Labov, the goal of (socio)linguistics is, therefore, to map these associations between variable linguistic behaviour and social structure. To do so, Labov and colleagues (Labov, 1965; Weinreich et al., 1968) identified a number of key “problems” that a field of sociolinguistics needs to address. Two of these are relevant to the discussion in this chapter. The first is the embedding problem, or the need to determine the degree of correlation that exists between the use of a linguistic variant and a given set of social and/or situational factors (e.g., gender, ethnicity, social class, formality). The second is the evaluation problem, or the need to establish the subjective correlates (i.e., attitudinal judgements) of specific variants. Identifying a variant’s social embedding allows us to predict when a variant will (or will not) be used while knowing how it is evaluated gives us insight into why those usage patterns exist. From very early on, research in this tradition has relied on experimental methods to provide insight into embedding and evaluation, ultimately helping us to better understand the social meanings of language, or the “set of inferences that can be drawn on the basis of how language is used in a specific interaction” (Hall-Lew et al., 2021). In this chapter, I provide an overview of the main experimental approaches that have been adopted, summarizing both historical perspectives and current directions in the field. By the end of the chapter, readers will have a general understanding of the primary experimental paradigms that have been used in sociolinguistic research and an idea of how experimental methods can be used to address key questions of sociolinguistic theory.

2019

Throughout its entire course of really vigorous development, psycholinguistics has pursued two lines of scholarly endeavour. Firstly, from its very first days it has always been trying to be experimental in nature. It means that its major assumptions have always been subject to some kind of testing, either in natural or laboratory settings. Secondly, it has followed a theoretical (and somewhat speculative) path, which means that a number of assumptions have been put forth and have been given the right of conduct in psycholinguistics without subsequent experimental work. This has been done in order to provide some kind of leeway which would allow those involved in psycholinguistic research to theorize about the seeming nature of human cognition and language. Both approaches have turned out to be extremely fruitful for the establishment of the identity of psycholinguistics as an autonomous subdiscipline of the study of language.

Cross-linguistic studies are essential to the identification of universal processes in language development, language use and language breakdown. Comparative studies in all three areas are reviewed, demonstrating powerful differences across languages in the order in which specific structures are acquired by children, the sparing and impairment of those structures in aphasic patients, and the structures that normal adults rely upon most heavily in real-time word and sentence processing. It is proposed that these differences reflect a cost-benefit trade-off among universal mechanisms for learning and processing (perception, attention, motor planning, memory) that are critical for language, but are not unique to language.

Cognitive Foundations of Language Structure and Use, 2007

 Monica Gonzalez-Marquez, Raymond B. Becker and James E. Cutting questions adequately, takes many years of training, false starts and successes. It all begins however, with learning to read a research paper. The approach can be thought of rather like reverse engineering, as each section of a research paper has a relationship to the research process. In the following sections we will deconstruct the research article with two goals in mind, to help you, as a new consumer of research literature, better understand published studies, and to help you, as a new experimentalist, design and develop your own experiments. As such, the material will first be presented for the benefit of a naïve reader followed by elaboration for the experimentalist. In the first section we recommend that you concentrate on the structure of the paper. Do not worry if you cannot follow the arguments well. What is important is to become familiar with the way a research story is told. Anything else that you manage to grasp will be icing on the cake. In the second section try to put yourself in the shoes of the researcher conducting the project by trying to understand why the researcher made the choices she did. Your ultimate goal, after all, is to understand the nature of those choices well enough to be able to conduct your own experiments. All of the information provided here should be general enough to apply to any type of behavioral research. To benefit most from this chapter, we recommend that you follow with a copy of a published experimental research article. We recommend those from a prestigious journal such as "Psychological Science" or "Cognitive Science." 1 "Stephen King's new novel will be available this Saturday at Modern Times Bookstore." This announcement may sound appealing to a Stephen King fan or inconsequential to someone who is not. Intimidating, overwhelming and confusing are not words usually evoked at the thought of actually reading the book. Many people would use precisely these terms, however, to describing reading a research article. There are reasons for this. Most people know what to expect from a novel. A novel is the telling of a story, and since King writes popular fiction, it is expected that the plot will contain a given set of elements that will be linked to each other in predictable ways. What makes a research article so intimidating to some readers is that they do not know what to expect. The American Psychological Association publishes a handbook that describes the general structure of articles. Though the handbook is aimed at researchers writing up their findings, following is an adaptation intended to help new consumers of psychological research know what to expect from a scientific research article. The analogy between reading a novel and reading a research article was intended to help you conceptualize an article as a story unfolding paragraph by paragraph. As in popular fiction, when we read a paper, what we want to know is, 1. What is the setting, 2. who did what to whom, where, why, how and with what, 3. what was the outcome, and 4. what . Those readers who do not have easy access to scientific journals will find that the proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society conference are available free online at cogsci.html