his assignment is the capstone of the class and is intended to give you an opportunity to integrate your knowledge of Psycholinguistic findings, theories, and methodologies in a research topic of your choice. The goal is for you to examine an area of language processing that interests you, become familiar with the relevant empirical findings and theories, and propose new research that addresses a theoretical question of your own design. The questions do not need be immense (they don’t need to be Nobel quality!); what is important is that they build on prior research and are thoughtfully reasoned and designed.
?!Structure
Your paper should be 10-14 pages in length and should contain the sections listed below. Your paper should include the italicized words below as section headers, but you should feel free to include sub-headings as you see fit.
!Introduction
Your introduction should begin with a paragraph or two where you set the stage for the rest of your paper. You should mention the cognitive domain you’re discussing (e.g., reading), mention the theoretical question(s) you are trying to address, and then in 1-2 sentences, describe how your experiments investigate the questions. This section should be brief, giving your reader a roadmap for the rest of the paper.
!Background
Following the initial paragraph(s), you should describe in a reasonably in-depth manner the cognitive domain you are focusing on. You should discuss the prevalent theories on what processes and representations are involved in the cognitive domain. For example, if you are discussing something pertaining to reading, you should describe the reading architecture, discussing the components of the dual-route theory (lexical, sublexical route, how each one functions, etc). If you were discussing sentence comprehension, you would want to discuss the fact that processing is incremental and that we build structure based on all sorts of information (e.g., syntactic rules, semantics, pragmatics, world-knowledge, frequency, sub-categorization frames). As much as you can, you should cite original articles for these theories (citing the textbook/class slides will not get you as much credit).
Your description of the cognitive domain should lay the groundwork for your investigation. For example, if you are dealing with top-down processing in spoken comprehension, you should describe the fact that researchers believe that there are top- down connections (e.g., word->phoneme connections), and why they think so.
Prospectus
Having laid out the relevant theoretical background, you should present the questions that your study will investigate. Your discussion should explicitly build on what you talked about in the background section (that means that what you discussed in the previous section needs to be relevant to your topic!!). Your questions should be theoretical in
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nature, not simply empirical. This means that your question should be based on the existing theory and should try to extend it, refine it, or test it in some manner.
What I don’t want are questions that are divorced from theory. An example of a bad question would be “are people faster at reading words in uppercase or lowercase?”. Why do you want to know? Once you have this answer, what conclusions about the cognitive architecture of reading can you draw? What I want is a theoretical question (e.g., how do readers map uppercase and lowercase forms onto the same letter?) that you can then test experimentally.
At this stage, you should discuss any experiments in the literature that have been done on this particular topic. For example, if you are focusing on the sub-lexical route in reading, you would want to cite any work that has specifically tried to investigate what rules are used, how it processes multimorphemic words, etc.
Finally, you should discuss how you will go about answering your questions. In no more than a couple of paragraphs, you should present the basic tack that you will take in your study (e.g., “I will study the sub-lexical system by seeing how people pronounce regular and irregular morphologically complex nonwords.”)
!Experiment 1
In this section, you should provide the details of your experiment. You should describe what your experiment is trying to do and why you think it will do what you want it to do. For example, if you are interested in testing the sub-lexical system, you should discuss why you think your method taps into sub-lexical processing (as opposed to, for example, the lexical route). You should describe your stimuli, procedure, and what kind of measurements you will be making.
!Experiment 2
The same, but with your second experiment.
!NOTE ON STIMULI: For both experiments you will need to describe your stimuli in sufficient detail that I can understand why they are important for your experiment (e.g., “I will choose monosyllabic nonwords that contain X”).!Discussion
At this point, you obviously don’t have any data to interpret, but you should discuss what the possible outcomes of your experiments are and how you would interpret them with regard to your question. What conclusions can you draw about the cognitive theory in question given the various possible outcomes? Finally, if you have any thoughts about it, you could also discuss future directions for this line of questioning.
!Appendix – Stimuli !NOTES
!Deadline
The deadline is absolute. You will receive a full-grade penalty for each day that the paper is late (e.g., if you turn your paper in on the 6th, your grade will be lowered by a full- grade).
!Quotations
Your paper should contain very few if any direct quotations. It is always better to reframe a passage in your own words and cite it than to quote it directly. By doing so, you will make sure you fully understand what the authors are discussing.
!APA
Your paper should include inline citations whenever you use a published source as well as a bibliography at the end of the paper listing your sources. The citations and bibliography should conform to APA conventions. A good overview of the APA style may be found here: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/1/ (see links on the left side of the web page).
???!Sample Topics
!I have included 5 sample research topics to provide you a sense of the type of research
questions that would be appropriate for this assignment.
!1. Semantics?
Mirman & Magnuson (2008) demonstrated that semantic neighborhood density has different effects on processing depending on whether the neighbors are similar or distant to the target concept. Processing is facilitated by having few close neighbors and many distant neighbors. Although the authors propose that this phenomenon is best explained by an ‘attractor landscape’, they do not consider other possibilities. The present work seeks to examine this issue by examining how other semantic properties interact with similar/distant neighborhood size in order to better understand the phenomenon.?
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Experiment 1: Does the abstractness/concreteness of a concept modulate the effect of neighborhood size? Abstract and concrete concepts seem to be processed differently,
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?with concrete concepts leading to faster reaction times than abstract concepts. This experiment examines whether the effect of neighborhood density reported by Mirman & Magnuson is modulated by a concept’s concreteness.?
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Experiment 2: Does semantic class modulate the effect of neighborhood size? Hillis & Caramazza reported that concepts from different classes (e.g., edible objects, living things, transportation, etc) appear to be represented in neurally distinct regions of the brain. This experiment examines whether the neighborhood effect reported by Mirman & Magnuson obtains for concepts from a variety of classes.?
2. Syntactic Processing & Bilingualism?
A variety of studies have demonstrated that syntactic comprehension is an interactive process, where listeners utilize semantic, frequency, pragmatic, and discourse information in order to parse sentences. One area that does not appear to have received much attention is whether bilinguals process sentences identically to monolinguals. This study investigates whether information from a subject’s native language (L1) affects the way they process sentences in their non-native language (L2).?
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Experiment 1: Research has shown that syntactic processing is guided in part by the frequency with which a word appears with a particular part of speech. For example, while ‘backpack’ can be a noun or a verb, it is much more frequently encountered as a noun. This experiment examines whether the frequency of a word’s L1 cognate affects how it is processed in the L2.?
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Experiment 2: Research has shown that syntactic structures can be primed: providing a subject with a particular sentence structure (e.g., the passive voice) increases the likelihood that the subject will use that structure in their own speech. This experiment investigates whether priming can be obtain across a bilingual’s languages.?
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3. Reading?
Theories of reading posit that there are two routes by which individuals may read a printed word aloud: a lexical route, that retrieves the word’s phonological form from long-term memory, and a sub-lexical route, where the phonology is computed on the basis of letter-sound correspondence rules. One area of communication that has not received much attention is texting. While some texting abbreviations involve pronounceable words (e.g., LOL), others are identified by their letter names (e.g., BTW). Since this form of literacy is becoming more and more common, it is important to understand how individuals process this kind of text. This study investigates whether subjects read various texting words using whole-word, lexical representations or whether they convert words to letter names in order to access semantics.?
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Experiment 1: The first experiment examines whether the phonology for pronounceable texting words are generated while subjects read these words for meaning. That is, do subjects generate the phonological form “lol” when reading LOL, or do they simply retrieve these words on the basis of their orthographic form??
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?Experiment 2: This experiment investigates whether the phonology of a texting word’s letter names is generated during written processing. That is, do subjects generate “bee tee double-yoo” when reading “BTW”, or do they simply retrieve these words on the basis of their orthographic form??
4. Spoken Production?
Theories of spoken production propose that activation may cascade from one level of processing to the next. For example, when producing the word CAT, semantic competitors such as DOG and RAT become active during processing and send activation to their component phonemes in addition to CAT activating its phonemes. One question that has not yet been addressed is how far information can cascade in this system. This study investigates whether information from semantics can cascade all the way to articulation or whether there is a more limited flow of activation.?
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Experiment 1: In general, words with concrete semantics (e.g., chair, butter, tree) tend to be processed more efficiently and robustly than words with abstract semantics (e.g., addition, equality, altruism). This suggests that concrete words have stronger, more robust semantic representations than abstract words. If this is true, concrete words may receive more activation from semantics than abstract words, and if this difference can cascade to articulation, we may be able to detect a difference using acoustic measurements. This experiment examines whether abstract and concrete words differ in their acoustic properties.?
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Experiment 2: In order to ensure that this effect has a semantic locus, the same measurements were conducted on words that differ by their age of acquisition. Since age of acquisition also affects how well words are processed but is not posited to have a semantic locus, the comparison between age of acquisition and concreteness will allow us to examine different sorts of cascading effects in spoken production.?
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5. Spelling?
Research has suggested that the spelling process involves a working memory store, typically referred to as the Graphemic Buffer. This store is hypothesized to maintain orthographic representations during the relatively slow process of spelling (which occurs one letter at a time). One question of interest about working memory stores is their capacity–how many items can they store at one time? This is of particular interest with the Graphemic Buffer given that languages differ in the average length of their words. This study investigates whether the graphemic buffer has a fixed letter capacity or whether the capacity can be expanded through exposure.?
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Experiment 1: This study investigates the graphemic buffer’s capacity by comparing spellers of languages with two very different average word lengths: English and German. Since German is an agglutinative language, its words are on average X letters in length, which is significantly greater than the average English length of Y. If experience with German words expands the capacity of the graphemic buffer, German spellers should show fewer errors on spelling long nonwords than English spellers.?
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Experiment 2: This study follows up on the first by determining whether it is possible to expand the capacity of the graphemic buffer through experience. In this study, subjects were trained on progressively longer nonwords for 2 weeks. A post-training test compared subjects who had been trained on long nonwords to a control group that had been trained on short non words.
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