Experimental methods in the study of morpho-syntactic variation, change and acquisition
In this course we will look at a range of different experimental paradigms used in psycholinguistics, like self-paced reading, timed judgements, priming and elicitation/production tasks. We will carefully discuss when and why it is appropriate to use online methods in addition to standard offline judgment tasks. In addition, we will learn how to set up experiments in the program OpenSesame (http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/3.2/), which is a freely available open source software that can be run on a laptop. Scripts will be provided for the experimental paradigms discussed, so that students easily can set up their own experiments. In each class we take a linguistic issue as our starting point, e.g. word order variation, form-meaning mapping or acquisition of morphology, and discuss how to approach it from an experimental perspective.