Methods and Applications: Psycholinguistics

Winter term 2017/2018 – time and room soon to be announced!
30 contact hours (1 class a week)
ECTS credits: 6
Lecturer: Maciej Karpiński

Course aims
Instruction will be provided on research techniques and methods in contemporary psycholinguistics. Observation-based and experimental studies from major subfields of psycholinguistics and covering most popular research approaches will be discussed along with fundamental questions and current issues in psycholinguistic research. Students will learn how to plan and carry out observations and how to design and carry out psycholinguistic experiments, taking appropriate care of technological means and ethical aspects.
Upon completion of the course, the student will be able to

  • name major subfields of psycholinguistics, define majors problems of psycholinguistic research and understand its place in contemporary studies of language and communication;
  • use psycholinguistic terminology and read academic texts in psycholinguistics;
  • design an observation-based study for a selection of typical research questions and situations;
  • design an experimental study for a selection of typical research questions and situations;
  • use software tools for psycholinguistic research;
  • critically analyse empirical psycholinguistic studies.

Content

  1. Psycholinguistics and its subfields (including language acquisition, learning and attrition, speech production and perception, lexical access and syntactic processing, and others).
  2. Psycholinguistics contextualised: Input from neurolinguistics, cognitive science, and acknowledgement of interactivity.
  3. From empirical research to theory and models and back: What is “true”, what is “real”,
  4. Observation and experiment: Challenges and typical issues.
  5. Software and hardware for empirical psycholinguistic studies.
  6. The design of observation: Steps and decisions.
  7. The design of experimental study: Steps and decisions.
  8. Standards and classics of experimental approach in psycholinguistics
    • Reaction time: Exploring lexical access, syntactic processing, speech perception.
    • Naming and lexical decision. Exploring the mental lexicon.
    • Priming and multiple stimuli procedures;
    • Eyetracking helps in language acquisition studies, reading research and interaction analysis.
    • Direct monitoring of brain activity. Event-Related Potentials studies (EEG). Contemporary neuroimaging techniques (CAT, PET, fMRI and others).
  9. Interaction and co-ordination. A wider view of psycholinguistic mechanisms. Alignment, entrainment, synchrony.
  10. Psycholinguists in the field. Consequences of going out of the lab. Collecting non-experimental data.
  11. Data analysis in psycholinguistics.

Bibliography (A much shorter list of obligatory texts will be presented directly to the participants of the course.)

  • Aitchison, J. 1998. The articulate mammal: an introduction to psycholinguistics. London: Routledge.
  • Aitchison, J. 2002. Words in the mind: an introduction to the mental lexicon. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Altmann, Gerry T. M. (ed.). 2002. Psycholinguistics: critical concepts in psychology. London; New York: Routledge.
  • Bock, J. K. & J. Huitema. 1999. Language production. In: Garrod, S. & M. Pickering (eds.). Language processing. Hove: Psychology Press, p. 365‐88.
  • Carroll, D. W. 2004. Psychology of language. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth /Thomson.
  • Field, A. and G. Hole. 2004. How to design and report experiments. London: Sage Publications.
  • Field, J. 2003. Psycholinguistics: a resource book for students. London: Routledge.
  • Garman, M. 1990. Psycholinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Garrod, S. & M. Pickering (eds.). 1999. Language processing. Hove: Psychology Press.
  • Garrod, S. 1999. The challenge of dialogue for theories of language processing. In: Garrod, S. & M. Pickering (eds.). Language processing. Hove: Psychology Press, p. 389‐415.
  • Gaskell, G. (ed.). 2007. Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Oxford University Press.
  • Gernsbacher, M. A. & J. A. Foertsch. 1999. Three models of discourse comprehension. In: Garrod, S. & M. Pickering (eds.). Language processing. Hove: Psychology Press, p. 283‐99.
  • Gernsbacher, M. A. (ed.). 1994. Handbook of psycholinguistics. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
  • Gleason, J. B. 1997. Psycholinguistics. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson.
  • Goodwin, C. J. 2010. Research in Psychology. Methods and Designs. Wiley.
  • Harley, T. A. 2001. The psychology of language: from data to theory. 2nd ed. Oxford: Taylor and Francis.
  • Kaiser, E. 2013. Experimental paradigms in psycholinguistics. Research methods in linguistics, 135-168.
  • Kess, J. F. 1992. Psycholinguistics: psychology, linguistics, and the study of natural language. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
    Levelt, W. J.M. 1989. Speaking: from thinking to articulation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Pederson, E., E. Danziger, D. Wilkins, S. Levinson, S. Kita & G. Senft. 1998. Semantic Typology and Spatial Conceptualization. Language 74.3:557-89.
  • Pickering, M. 1999. Sentence comprehension. In: Garrod, S. & M. Pickering (eds.). Language processing. Hove: Psychology Press, pp. 123‐53.
  • Rumsey, D. J. 2010. Statistics essentials for dummies. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Scovel, T. 1998. Psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Searle, A. 1999. Introducing Research and Data in Psychology. A Guide to Methods and Analysis. Routledge.
  • Smith Cairns, H. 1999. Psycholinguistics: an introduction. Austin, TX: Pro‐Ed.
  • Steinberg, D. D. & Sciarini, N. V. 2006. An introduction to psycholinguistics. London: Pearson Longman.
  • Steinberg, D. D. 1993. An introduction to psycholinguistics. London, New York: Longman.
  • Steinberg, D. D., H. Nagata & D. P. Aline (eds.). 2001. Psycholinguistics: language, mind, and world. London: Longman.
  • Vygotsky, L. S. 1962. Thought and language. E. Haafmann & G. Vakar. Ed & Trans. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 9