Anything we have discussed so far in class (or that is mentioned in the book) would make a good research paper topic. But there is still much in psycholinguistics that we haven't covered or may not even get to before the end of the quarter. Any of the following subjects would also make excellent topics for a research paper or project:

The Whorf Hypothesis (i.e., how much does language influence thought?)

--Also: influences of culture on language

--Gender differences in language

Language Acquisition (see chapters 10 and 11)

--Infant speech perception

--Semantic, phonological, morphological development, etc.

--Acquisition of sign language

--Isolated children

--Infant-directed speech

--Twin language studies

--Acquisition by children with learning disorders

Aphasias (e.g., Wernicke's area, Broca's area)

Dyslexia

Semantic-Pragmatic disorder

Speech production (slips of the tongue) or perception errors (slips of the ear)

--Effects of alcohol or extreme conditions on speech performance

--Stuttering

--Tip of the tongue phenomenon

Effects of deafness on language

--Effects of cochlear implants

Non-auditory influences on speech perception

--McGurk effect (reading lips)

--The Tadoma method (perceiving speech through the sense of touch)

Animal language experiments

--Primate studies

--Animal communication and its relation to language (e.g., dolphins, bees)

--Speech perception in chinchillas (and other species)

Computer-modelling of linguistic knowledge

--Neural network models vs. rule-based models

--Speech recognition and speech synthesis

Note that this list is not exclusive; there are many other topics which would be perfectly fine as well. This list is just meant to get you started and hopefully give you a good idea as to what's possible. You should do some more research on your own to find out what really catches your interest. The following URLs may help get you started:

http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu/OhioLINK/PsycInfo.html

http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu/OhioLINK/isi.html