Ling/Psych 371

May 1, 2000

For your term paper, you will need to turn in an abstract this coming Monday, May 8^th. Your abstract should be approximately 150 to 250 words in length and should be a brief synopsis of your paper, the topic you would like to cover and what, exactly, you would like to say about that topic. Needless to say, writing your abstract will require some effort on your part. You will need to think through the basic structure of your paper and boil your topic down to a point where you can talk about it intelligently.

A lot of you have chosen paper topics that are fairly broad, and some topics do not readily submit to experimental testing (the Whorf hypothesis, for example). It’s fine to do this, if you want to. If you are less clear about which direction your paper should take, it may be easier to focus on one aspect of a certain line of research and just dig into experimental studies that seem to support one side or another of a particular theoretical argument. Below you will find a sample abstract on the Stroop Effect which shows how this might be done–concentrating on how the Stroop Effect may or may not show that reading is automatic. Similar approaches with other topics might involve studies that seem to show primates have acquired syntax; studies that prove people "strip affixes" when they process morphologically complex words; studies of dyslexics that show that people process written words differently than they do spoken words, etc. Even though tackling such "little issues" may not seem that exciting, it can help you manage the short amount of time in which you have to research and write this paper.

Note that I am not requiring anyone to read through entire books on a particular subject for this class. (You have enough to work on as it is.) Books would be primarily helpful in providing you with background information about a topic, to a greater extent than you might find in our textbook. They can also provide you with leads to meatier and more manageable references.

You might want to think about your abstract as essentially an advertisement for your real paper. It should provide your audience with enough background information about your topic and paper to get them to want to read it. But it shouldn’t get so specific and detailed that they decide to turn the channel instead. The example below may provide a useful template to work from--

For my term paper, I would like to investigate the Stroop Effect and whether or not this phenomenon supports the claim that reading is an automatic process. The Stroop Effect occurs when people are asked to say the color of a word which is the name of a different color. For example, when the word "blue" is printed in green, people take a significantly longer time to say "green" then they would if the word "green" had been printed in green. Since there appears to be interference between the processing of the written word and the color name (even when people aren’t concentrating on reading the word), it has been claimed that reading must be an automatic process. However, I will cite evidence showing that training and practice can undo the Stroop Effect and that, therefore, reading is not necessarily automatic. The supposed "automaticity" of reading may be nothing more than an illusion that is based on other factors, such as excessive familiarity with the reading task. Correspondingly, I will present evidence from other studies which show that children and other people unfamiliar with reading (such as speakers of languages without a roman orthographic system) do not exhibit the Stroop Effect.

Bower, B. (1992, May 9). Brother Stroop's enduring effect: A mental task devised nearly 60 years ago still intrigues psychologists. Science News, 141, 312-314.

Stroop, J.R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 643-662.

MacLeod, Colin M. (1991). Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An Integrative approach. Psychological Bulletin, 109:2,163-203.