Monday, April 24th: Topic/Project idea and list of references due

Monday, May 8th: Abstracts due

Wednesday, May 17th: (Optional) drafts due

Friday, May 26th: Final papers due

Research papers should be typed, double-spaced, and at least 8 pages but no more than 10 pages in length, excluding the title page and the reference page (so that’s 8-10 pages of text).

The purpose of the research paper is to further your understanding of experimental approaches to language through investigating some psycholinguistic issue in depth. By "investigating in depth" I have in mind one of three basic possibilities--either conducting a brief literature review of some topic that interests you, proposing an experimental project that would test some psycholinguistic hypothesis, or developing a proposal and actually carrying it out and reporting on the results you find. I want to give you a variety of choices for the research paper so that you feel free to challenge yourself as much as you would like; however, my expectations for the minimal amount of work you undertake is even across the three basic kinds of choices. Since carrying out a project can involve a good deal of organization and effort, I would expect those who only develop a project proposal to concentrate a greater amount of energy on reviewing past research which is relevant to their proposal, as well as describing in greater detail how their project would fit in with the results of those previous projects, etc.

There are numerous possibilities for project or research paper topics. To help give you some idea of what is possible, I will put on reserve in the main library several copies of an excerpt from a book called Projects in Linguistics. This excerpt consists of three chapters, one dealing with psycholinguistics, another dealing with child language acquisition, and yet another concerning experimentation in general. A few examples will follow below.

If your project requires that you look for articles in the psycholinguistic/psychological literature (and it almost certainly will), then I recommend that you search in the PsychINFO database. (On the web go to http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu/Tools/titles/html#P for an alphabetic listing of databases, select "P" and then click on PsychINFO, preferably the more recent one, i.e. 1967- present). You may use an article in the popular press as a starting point, but in general these articles do not go into any significant amount of detail and you will need an article from the psychology literature to provide more specific information. By popular press I mean newspapers or magazines such as Time, Newsweek, Discover, and Popular Science, etc.

Literature Review: Choose a topic in psycholinguistics that interests you--e.g., categorical perception, structure of the mental lexicon, processing of sentences or discourse, language disorders in children or adults, etc. Find a small selection of papers on the topic and critically review them. Keep in mind that a critical review is not necessarily one that is negative in tone but one that evaluates the work. A critical review of a scholarly work usually includes a summary of what the author(s) set out to do and how successfully the goals have been achieved. Your summary should explain the question under study, the rationale for the question (background), the way the experiment(s) were set up to answer that question, what the results were, and how they answered the question of interest. You should provide some critical commentary on the individual projects themselves: do you think the experiment was set up well? are there any possible confounds? could they modify the experiment to get less ambiguous results? should they have done an additional experiment to clear up any confusion in the data? do you think they answered their questions adequately? what is the next logical step in this research? If you find papers with conflicting approaches and/or conclusions, then critically compare and contrast the papers with each other. Which approach (or results) do you find more compelling? What reasons might there be for conflicting results? What kind of test might resolve the conflict? If you find papers that seem to be in concord with each other, consider other points of view they might not have thought of. How does the research fit into the "big picture" issues we discussed at the beginning of class?

Projects: once again, projects can get pretty involved, but if you have looked at the two excerpted chapters from Projects in Linguistics, you will see that a few are doable. If you choose this option, you should write up your study like a psycholinguistic journal article, with introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections. In the introduction, you should briefly explain the inspiration behind your project--including what you want to find out (hypotheses, etc.) and what relevance it has to psycholinguistic theory in the first place. In your methods section you should describe in specific detail how you went about testing your hypothesis. In your results section you should give the quantitative results of your study--especially with respect to the hypothesis you were testing. Figuring out the best way to present your results can be one of the more crucial (and tricky) steps in writing a good paper, so don't be shy about recruiting your instructor's (or a friend's) help in doing so. Your discussion section should tie the outcomes of your experiment back in with the introduction; you should consider what your research has shown you about your hypothesis and what significance it might have for psycholinguistic theory.

If you choose to replicate an experiment from the literature, please look up the original paper and use it as background in your write-up. If you are not replicating an experiment from the literature, you should try to find out whether anyone has done this or something similar before you, and use their paper as background. In either case, relate the results to what you will have learned in class.

Project Proposal: I envision this option as falling somewhere in between the project and lit review alternatives. In developing a project proposal you should be more concerned with the theoretical implications of your hypothesis and general expectations. If you have a good idea for a (realistic) project which would especially illuminate some dark and twisted corner of psycholinguistic theory--even though you might not be able to do it in just one quarter's time--then you would want to go this route. Project proposals should also be written up with introduction and methods sections (see above). For your conclusion, you might consider hypothetical results and what they reveal about your earlier discussion of the theory and past research.

Finally, please feel free to discuss your topic/project with me outside of class.