Research Methods in Psycholinguistics

New Bulgarian University

This course focuses selectively on central research techniques in the field of psycholinguistics with respect to sentence comprehension, lexical processing, picture-naming, and priming studies. Individual classes introduce the main methodology tools relevant to the topic and encourage students to develop their own experimental designs, either individually or in teams. Assessment is based on studentsí successful development and presentation of project work

Class 1: Methods for research of the lexicon.

Required:

Cutler, Anne (1995) Spoken Word Recognition and Production. In: Miller, J. & Eimas, P. (eds) Speech, Language, and Communication. San Diego: Academic Press

Seidenberg, M. (1995) Visual Word Recognition: An Overview. In: Miller, J. & Eimas, P. (eds) Speech, Language, and Communication. San Diego: Academic Press

Optional:

Lively, S., Pisoni, D., Goldfinger, S. (1994) Spoken Wordö Recognition: Research and Theory. Handbook of Psycholinguistics. (ed. Gernsbacher, M. A.) San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 265-301

Class 2: Research of sentence comprehension.

Required:

Tanenhaus, M. & Trueswell, J. (1995) Sentence Comprehension. In: Miller, J. & Eimas, P. (eds) Speech, Language, and Communication. San Diego: Academic Press

Optional:

Von Berger, E., Wulfeck, B., Bates, E., & Fink, N. (1996) Developmentalchanges in real-time sentence processing. First Language, 16, 193-222

Mitchell, Don (1994) Sentence Parsing. In: Handbook of Psycholinguistics. (ed. Gernsbacher, M. A.) San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 375-409

Simpson, G. (1994) Context and the Processing of Ambiguous Words. In: Handbook of Psycholinguistics. (ed. Gernsbacher, M. A.) San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 359-374

Class 3: Picture naming.

Required:

Glaser, Wilhelm R. (1992) Picture Naming. Cognition, 42, pp. 61-105

Optional:

Johnson, C., Paivio, A. & Clark, J. (1996) Cognitive Components of Picture Naming. Psychological Bulletin, 120 (1), 113-139

Class 4: Priming studies.

Required:

Neely, J. H. (1991). Semantic priming effects in visual word recognition: A selective review of current findings and theories. In D. Besner and G. Humphreys (Eds.), Basic Processes in Reading: Visual word recognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Optional:

Love, T. & Swinney, D. (1996) Coreference Processing and Levels of Analysis in Object-Relative Constructions; Demonstrations of Antecedent Reactivation with the Cross-Modal Priming Paradigm. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25 (1), 5-24

Class 5: Project work: presentation, discussion, and conclusions.

Small Groups
Participants will work in groups discussing the design and the results of particular experiments.

Assignment
Participants wishing to get credits for the course should design and run an experiment and write a paper describing the results.

Elena Andonova has a PhD from Cardiff University, UK. She is Assistant Professor in Psycholinguistics and Linguistics at the New Bulgarian University. She works in the fields of psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and discourse analysis. She found some interesting evidence for gender differences in gender processing in language.